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I'll have to confirm my time measurement again, but here's the problem. Exactly every 112 seconds, an IRQ 1 (which is my keyboard) is generated and a backwards apostrophe ( ` ) is produced. To say this is annoying is an understatement. This is not related to X11 since the problem arises immediately on a text login prior to even starting the X server. On a separate partition I have Windows98 installed, and I have no such problem with Windows and never have. I have a Dell XPS R450 running an Intel PII chip, the keyboard is "labelled" Dell Model SK-6000, it's a "natural keyboard".
Correction to my frequency measurement. The apostrophe is generated exactly every 64 seconds, give or take 1 second.
This is most definitely a hardware problem
I can understand why this seems to be a hardware problem, but I'm not entirely clear that this is actually the case. Why is it that under Windows I have no problems with my keyboard, spurious apostrophes, etc, yet under Linux I have a perfectly timed interrupt being detected every 64 seconds and translated into an apostrophe. I'm wondering if my keyboard is sending some sort of "keep-alive" signal that my windows drivers understand and ignore, but the Linux drivers do not? There's almost no information on keyboards and their drivers so I don't really know how to further diagnose the problem. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm confident this can work under Linux if it works under the less-exciting operating system.`