[BRLTTY] Two problems with Pegasus display from Deininger

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Sebastian Humenda on 2010/04/05 at 16:25 +0200]

>If I understood you right, this would be the same in Gnome, which in fact
>isn't. 

That's a helpful additional observation. It does verify that your problem seems 
to be related to brltty.

>Or is Gnome handling (because of the X-server) the keyboard in a
>different way?

No, I don't think so. I'm sure it handles keys in essentially the same way.

>My speech is configured to speak very fast, hence I hear all keys I press (I
>can't verify, but distinguish them). When this problem occures the speech
>stops for felt milliseconds and then begins reporting the repeated keys
>and the keys which I pressed afterwards. However, this is only how I think it
>happens.

This, also, is a helpful observation. I'm now beginning to think that your 
system is either very busy or there's perhaps a process on your system which 
sometimes claims the CPU for whatever reason for a long time. If brltty doesn't 
get the CPU quickly enough then it's very possible that it processes the key's 
release event some time after its press event. If this delay is long enough, 
the virtual keyboard device which brltty echoes the key events back into may 
well start to repeat.

Of course, we could ask the same question regarding why this doesn't happen 
with gnome. It's possible that gnome, or whatever within the gnome complex 
handles key events, runs with a better scheduling priority which would allow it 
to process the key events right away. It may be as simple as the kernel somehow 
understanding that the gnome process should be treated as being interactive 
whereas I'm sure it doesn't consider brltty to be interactive.

Please do a simple test to see if the problem occurs less often: Find out the 
process identifier (pid) of brltty. You can do this with the command:

   pgrep brltty

Then, as root, issue the following command to give brltty a better go at the 
CPU:

   renice -20 pid

There's also another possibility, i.e. that your speech engine is occasionally 
causing brltty to hang. Are you able to try working with speech turned off to 
see if the problem goes away?

>>>For the other problem with the first routing key I started brltty and
>>>clicked once on the first and then once on the second routing key. The
>>>same I repeated in a text editor. I attach the file below.
>>The log file shows both keys being pressed. Insofar as routing keys are 
>So I guess it might be a hardware problem. thanks and sorry for the time wasted
>on it.

First of all, you don't need to be sorry for asking about a problem. If the 
problem turns out to be caused by something else then so be it ... you still 
need to have it checked out.

No, I don't think it's a hardware problem at all. Your Pegasus, based on your 
log, is clearly sending the event for the first routing key. Is it possible 
that you're simply in an environment where the cursor can't be moved to the 
first character?

If you have brltty's alert tunes turned on, you should always hear a tune 
whenever you press a routing key. Can you test to see whether you do or don't 
hear the routing tune when you press the first routing key?

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Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
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