sticky keys

[Stuart McGraw]

On 04/01/2015 11:27 AM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 09:58:29AM -0600, Stuart McGraw wrote:
>> On 03/31/2015 05:41 AM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:58:53PM -0600, Stuart McGraw wrote:
>>>> And yet another problem with Fedora-21...
>>>>
>>>> When I press my Shift keys quickly a few times (which I often
>>>> do unconsciously while thinking about what to type), I get a
>>>> notification that "sticky keys have been enabled".  I then
>>>> get a lot of odd keyboard effects such as every word typed
>>>> being capitalized or the keyboard acting like the control key
>>>> is permanently pressed.
>>>>
>>>> Googling seems to indicate this is an old problem going back
>>>> to the mid-2000's.
>>>
>>> It's a feature, to enable sticky keys as needed.  I had the same problem
>>> with some older release of XFCE.  I solved it by disabling all assistive
>>> technologies, as I do not need them.  If this is true for you too, you
>>> can disable it by unchecking the "Enable assistive technologies" option
>>> in the "Assistive Technologies" tab in Settings > Accesibility.
>>
>> Yup, did that.  Multiple times. :-)  I even looked at that dialog
>> right after the sticky keys feature became active and all the
>> checkboxes were still unchecked.
>
> Hmm, I think I recall now this did not solve the problem.  I think the
> commandline equivalent for those menu options are the following:
>
>    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.keyboard stickykeys-enable false
>    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.keyboard slowkeys-enable false
>    # to disabble accesibility altogether
>    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.keyboard enable false
>
> Although I think you will not have success with either of these.  I
> think culprit is the login manager, not the desktop.  Are you using GDM?
> I think that is responsible for this issue.  I use lightdm now, I think
> that is how I eventually solved my issue.

Thanks, I will look into that.

But I am gobsmacked at the nature of this problem.  Here is a bug
report for the problem on Ubuntu.
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-control-center/+bug/41427
It starts in 2007 and continues into 2013 with no resolution!  WTF?

I realize now that the "G" in Gdm is "Gnome" and that perhaps explains
it.

I think Fedora has a lot of responsibility here as well.  This
problem seems to be well known yet I had to spend hours trying to
figure out what was going on.  If Fedora is going to provide Gdm
by default then at a bare minimum, this problem should be mentioned
in the Fedora Release Notes or the System Admin Guide along with
a recommended fix.

Going forward I think I will be looking at eliminating not just gdm
but as much of Gnome from my computer as is humanly possible.