Special keys stopped working on Debian trixie

[cheepeero]

Hi!

I have played around with my pinenote, and all was well. I am uncertain if it was I that messed up, but after a while the on-screen keyboard became unusable because the special keys stopped working.

Here is the problem, which appears in all apps, but let's say in a terminal: all normal keys work (for instance, typing ls). However, backspace does not, Enter does not. The result is that I cannot run any command in the terminal. Ctrl and Alt also seem to be broken


What I suspect is some setting got broken when I added and enabled some other keyboard layouts I use on most computers. I vaguely remember Enter did not work on those layouts, so I reverted back to the preinstalled "en" layout, but that one does not work. But I am not sure. I have been updating it via SSH, hoping for a fix, but only now I got some time aside to look into this.

I would like to recover this, since I have already configured it well. I can operate it via SSH, but I am unsure what to look for. I am mostly a Plasma user, so I am unfamiliar with Gnome applications and settings, but I can manage with gsettings and such.

Thank you!

[nicolaos]

I'm experiencing the same thing. OOTB the on screen keyboard worked as expected. After running upgrades via apt (which required running sudo rm /lib64 in order to work), removing some of the pre-installed apps, and adding some new ones I don't even have the same keyboard. None of the changes I made were to intentionally swap out the on screen keyboard, but the new one doesn't have the arrow or ctrl keys and the backspace key isn't working. Letters, numbers, symbols, and the enter key seem to work fine.

[cheepeero]

I am not familiar with Linux on these devices, even though I used desktop linux for a long time. What is the package / application that sets up the on-screen keyboard? Where is it configured? Perhaps removing the user-level setting would reset it to the system defaults from the initial image?

On another topic, I have plugged some external keyboards into the USB-C port (via an adapter), but they do not seem to work. I have not tested this in a long time, though. However, an external keyboard would be a workaround to making the pinetab usable, as opposed to using ssh.

[j_s]

On another topic, I have plugged some external keyboards into the USB-C port (via an adapter), but they do not seem to work. I have not tested this in a long time, though. However, an external keyboard would be a workaround to making the pinetab usable, as opposed to using ssh.

There is already a topic and poll about the USB C port not working on the PineNote at
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...#pid124869

There is also an issue about it on github at:
https://github.com/PNDeb/pinenote-debian...issues/106
which reports some progrss, but it is still an open issue.

[cheepeero]

Thanks! I will read and monitor the threads on the USB-C.

This leaves the on-screen keyboard problem.