asciipr0n

When I finally got around to upgrading my Ubuntu install to 8.10 (“Intrepid Ibex”) earlier this week, I ran into an issue with my keyboard. Yeap. My keyboard.

My left-arrow key no longer worked. My right arrow-key didn’t work. My up-arrow key became Print-screen. The first thing I did was hit the Ubuntu forums, where I found about a dozen “solutions” which either didn’t work or were just plain hacks. I finally found one that worked for me:

1. Open up /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist with your favorite text editor. Make sure you open it up with root privileges.
2. Add the following line into that file. Save, close, and reboot.

   blacklist evdev

Apparently, this was a known issue in the release candidate, but they went ahead and did a general availability release by just documenting a temporary solution in a forum. Breaking keyboard functionality (it worked perfectly in 8.04) is not the way to win new users, especially when the distribution is billed as user-friendly. I’d rather they push their release date back than have a show-stopper like this make it’s way out the door.