Hi there,
still new to Manjaro, I mainly use it from the text console but sometimes need to work in Gnome as well. On the console, everything works very much to my liking. In Gnome, however, pressing certain keys make the environment stop to respond to further input. This is with a German keyboard layout and happens for instance when pressing the special character ssharp. I can write this text and insert numbers, even umlauts like ö or ä, but pressing ssharp or some function keys would freeze the desktop.
Gnome is running on Xorg started from the text console via startx. Interestingly, when I move ~/.xinitrc out of the way so that startx does not launch Gnome but just an xterm instead, there seem to be no issues at all. In particular, pressing ssharp simply inserts the character as expected. In Gnome, however, launching xterm and pressing that same key makes the desktop freeze. I still can switch to another console with ctrl+alt+f3 or, alternatively, I can kill the X server by pressing ctrl+alt+backspace, which returns me to the text console.
Do you have any idea how to investigate this issue? I am an experienced Linux user (mostly from the command line) but relatively new to Manjaro.
Thank you, @Hanzel, for the pointers. The journal has provided me with lots of hints for further investigation and in the end it turned out to be a very simple fix: Since I launch the desktop via startx from a terminal, I had to make sure that the dbus-session started by systemd-logind does not get masked by a call to dbus-launch in .xinitrc. In order to make this work for startx as well as gdm, I inserted the following at the end of get_session():
if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ] ; then
echo "dbus-launch ${dbus_args[*]}"
else
# Drop the first two elements from dbus_args array
echo "${dbus_args[*]:2}"
fi
replacing the line
echo "dbus-launch ${dbus_args[*]}"
Now I can type ß without makin the system freeze again.
