I do so love strange OS and hardware interactions.

I have a year old IBM notebook with a P3. All this time, I've had a strange input problem that would crop up every once and a while. On several occasions I thought I had solved the problem. I messed with the bios settings. I built a kernel with apic support. Both times I thought I'd solved the problem until a couple months later it would appear again. And when it appeared, the input problem would happen frequently. I'd be lucky to go an hour without it driving me nuts. Eventually, it would disappear and I'd have no clue why. I felt like I was back in windowsland.

The problem would do one of two things. Either keyboard input would be dead, or you could no longer change window focus in X. Sometimes it would fix itself. Sometimes I'd give up waiting and have to log in remotely so I could kill X.

Anyway, about a month ago I finally solved the final part of the mystery. What was killing me was warm rebooting! Something wasn't being restored correctly from a warm reboot.

I don't know for sure but it appears the killer was time. After a warm reboot, traceroute would regularly show negative packet times. With a cold reboot, I haven't been able to get any negative times. Everything runs smoothly. I'm now a much happier notebook owner.

David "LordBeatnik"

Ross's problem reminded me of my strange experience to I figured it wouldn't hurt to add an account of mine. Thankfully, I found a solution for mine. Who knows, maybe it's even the same problem.

What made this weird was that this is a linux only notebook! The problem appears when warm booting from linux to linux. If I had windows installed, then I would have thought of warm booting being a cause earlier. But, I'd never had a problem before when booting from linux to linux before.

I don't know whether the bios or linux is to blame. Either way, I now know cold reboots are my friend.

David "LordBeatnik"