Multiple characters from keyboard

[swefredde]

Hi,

Iv'e started the RH362 course and sometimes when I use the Workstation console some of the characters I type gets multiplied. It could be 2, 5, 7 or even more. I've worked through the OpenShift 180 and 280 courses without noticig this problems so I figure it's somehow related to the lab environment? I've recreated the lab environment a couple of times but the problem persists.

It's especially problematic with all the passwords where you don't see the duplication.

Is it a known problem with a known solution or is it something I have to live with?

If this is relevant:
My Firefox browser is set to "Language   English(US)"
On my local Fedora Workstation I have this conf (se for Swedish):

System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
VC Keymap: se
X11 Layout: se

When I'm logged in as student@workstation I get this:

System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
VC Keymap: n/a
X11 Layout: n/a

Best regards,
/Fredrik

[swefredde · Accepted solution]

Hmm, now I've started to see similar problems in other HTML5 browser consoles so I figure the problem is related to my browser somehow.

So it seems this is not at all related to the lab environment, but I gladly take any advice on how to solve it...

/Fredrik

[Travis · Accepted solution]

@swefredde -

MacOS had some issues a while bad with one of their updates. They've since released a new update to resolve the repeating character issue. However, there are times where the VNC console for workstation will repeat characters and that is adjustable in the "Accessibility Settings". Depending on the exact course and RHEL version of your "workstation" VM, it could be in a couple different spots.

So if you have activities you can click it or the Super-Key (Windows Key)+S on the keyboard to search. Start typing "Accessibility",

For typing, set Repeat Keys to off. The other thing you can do is set a delay, but to get rid of any possibility of repeating keys from our end, you can turn it off. This disables holding down a key on the keyboard and allowing it to repeat.

 

Hope this helps a little more ...

[swefredde]

Hi Travis and thanks for the answer.

I tried fiddling a little with the Accessability settings and it's much better now. I guess I can fine tune it some more and get rid of the problem completely.

Regards,
/Fredrik

[Travis]

You're welcome and glad it helped. Unfortunately, since it is the VNC session, lags in connections (bandwidth, dropped packets, jitter) can impact things. Also, depending on the cloud environment load and the VM or your local machine might cause repeating issues. 

You can fine-tune things all you want and it might need to be tuned differently based on the day/time you are connecting. I ultimately sometimes just turn it off completely because rarely do I want to hold a key down and repeat the characters anyway.

[swefredde]

Thanks again Travis,

Turning it off completely gives me the best experience.

You can consider the question answered and close this thread but I have another "luxury"-question while speaking about keyboard/keymapping issues. Give it attention accordingly.

At home I get all my redhat-family distributions to behave the way I'm used to by using the "localectl" command suite. This gives me the following behaviour when printing ^ and ~

I push shift + ^  and Alt-Gr + ~ on my Swedish layout keybord. What then happens is that the cursor stays at the ^/~ position until I press the space bar. Then it prints the character and moves the cursor to the next position.

I've also, on occation, used setups where the ^/~ charactes were printed immediately and the cursor moved to the next position. Like when you print the letter a or b.

In the lab environment, almost the same thing happens as at home but when I press the spacebar, the ^/~ character is printed AND an extra space after the ^/~. Then I have to press backspace if it's not the last character in a sequence or if it's a password I want to write.

I solved most my keyboard issues years back and don't run into it very often these days. I'm old enough to have used the "dumpkeys -> Edit -> loadkeys" sequence but I figure it's a better way nowadays?

I don't even have the terminology to google it. I've seen "dead keys", "compose keys" and "modifier keys". Do you have any hints on how to alter between the three behaviors above.

Regards,
/Fredrik