On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Edward G. Speyer wrote: > In the past week I have been suffering from a rather odd bug (or pair of > bugs perhaps) on my woody iBook: keys on the keyboard seem to be sticking > down and my mouse is quite jerky. This problem has not cropped up in Mac > OS X and I am pretty sure it isn't my hardware, but that is obviously not > a proof. > > Both these problems are intermittent and seem to occur at the same time > (though I may be wrong here -- the bug(s) don't seem particularly > reproducible, they just happen). I have tried plugging a USB mouse in at > the same time, and when the trackpad becomes unresponsive / jerky, the USB > mouse seems just fine.
Last night, after about 3 hours of listening to Oggs with XMMS and some intermittent editting with vim, I noticed my mouse starting to get jerky again and random keys on the keyboard would start repeating every so often (even with fingers off the keyboard, those darn letters just a keep on comin'). It might not be relevant, but the stickiness and jerkiness coincided with the fan coming on to cool the extremely hot laptop. I think I also plugged the power in sometime near the problems happening. The problem happened in both X and a virtual console. Rebooting into Debian didn't change anything, which suggested I might just have melted some hardware. However, rebooting into Mac OS X (these were all soft reboots BTW) gave me a working keyboard and mouse, and they continued to work after booting back into Debian (with the fan still on and the laptop still v. hot). Is this some sort of odd kernel / PMU interaction bug? Could Mac OS X be sanitising something in the hardware that fixes the problem under Linux? Truly weird. Ed
