I’ve been using a Sun Type 7 keyboard on my Linux (OpenSuSE 15.6) machine for 5 years. Today, however, some keys suddenly stopped working during my work. They used to function upon system startup, though.
The following keys are now dead: >, Y, X, C, B, ←, →, Space, Ctrl, left Meta, left Alt, 2 (on the numeric keypad), 3 (ditto), and some of the special keys on the left end of the keyboard. The other keys seem to work.
A reboot did not help. Neither did detaching and reattaching the KB. I performed a test with xev and evtest, and in both cases, none of the keys in question emitted any signals. Simply nothing. A different keyboard (an old Siemens one on the PS/2 port) works flawlessly.
What’s wrong here? 5 years for an expensive keyboard shouldn’t be much, should be? And: Dirt should not be the culprit, as I’ve always kept the keyboard clean. I used to have a similar issue with two other keyboards (Model M and a very old LK401), and in both cases, it turned out that the conductive stripes printed on plastic sheets were corroded in some places.
