On both RedHat 5.2 and 5.0, we have the same problem. When on the console the user presses on Caps_Lock or Num_Lock, the terminal hangs for 13 seconds. Everything works correctly, but 13 seconds is a long time to wait for a keypress to work! The effect is the same whether X11 runs or not. We use the following keymap file: /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwertz/fr_CH-latin1.map.gz although the same problem continues to happen when I used loadkeys to switch back and forth with the US keymap. I have used loadkeys to change the key mapping for keycode 58 between Caps_Lock and, for example, "a". The problem disappears when the mapping is changed from Caps_Lock, but reappears when the mapping is restored. For us the priority is fairly high on this problem because linux is more and more being used on user's desk and they don't understand when told that the Caps_Lock key doesn't work and of course when they press either Caps_Lock or Num_lock by error, they get very confused when the keyboard stops working and then they complain to their boss who complains to me... I have searched every archive I could get my hands on and saw nothing relating to this problem. My guess would be that it might be related to our hardware configuration. We see this on all our HP Vectra VL2 and XM2. These are 486 PC's. Our keyboard is the SwissFrench one, but I've just restarted my test PC with our lone US keyboard and directly at the login prompt the problem appears: press Caps_Lock and 12-13 seconds later linux starts echoing characters again. When I rlogin to the PC, in my rlogin window the problem doesn't appear. Alain Brossard brossard
Dave, have you been able to verify this on 5.2? I can't on 5.9 beta, so I assume console-tools has fixed it, but I'd like to know if you can verify.
I was unable to replicate this problem on a freshly installed 5.2 machine.