Keyboard issues with GNOME on a PowerBook G4 running OpenBSD
While setting up OpenBSD on my PowerBook, I ran across a problem with GNOME. My mouse would work fine but the moment I tried to type something, key presses would not register and mouse clicks would no longer work. The caps lock lights still worked and I could ssh to the machine so it was not locked up. Restarting X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace seemed to be the only way out. The problem was the same if GNOME was started from GDM or from startx. FVWM from startx worked fine, so it wasn't a hardware issue. After much searching I finally stumbled upon a thread from OpenBSD's misc@ email list that matched my problem: OpenBSD 4.6, powerpc, KDE, Gnome, XFCE play nicely? The next email in the thread mentioned problems with XDM, and I too was also experiencing problems with GDM. The third email pointed me to the right location for the solution, "the second parapgraph of /usr/X11R6/README" which states: To use xdm from rc.conf, it is necessary to disable /dev/ttyC0 in /etc/tty