The Linux keyboard and console HOWTO: Hardware incompatibility

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## 22. Hardware incompatibility

Several people have noticed that they lose typed characters when a floppy disk is active. It seems that this might be a problem with Uni-486WB motherboards.

Tjalling Tjalkens (`tjalling@ei.ele.tue.nl`) reports very similar problems with "a no-brand GMB-486 UNP Vesa motherboard with AMD 486DX2-66 CPU" - during floppy activity some keystrokes are lost, during floppy tape streamer (Conner C 250 MQ) activity many keystrokes are lost.

Some people experience sporadic lockups - sometimes associated to hard disk activity or other I/O.

Ulf Tietz (`ulf@rio70.bln.sni.de`) wrote: `I have had the same problems, when I had my motherboard tuned too fast. So I reset all the timings ( CLK, wait statements etc ) to more conventional values, and the problems are gone.'

Bill Hogan (`bhogan@crl.com`) wrote: `If you have an AMI BIOS, you might try setting the Gate A20 emulation parameter to "chipset" (if you have that option). Whenever I have had that parameter set to any of the other options on my machine ("fast", "both", "disabled") I have had frequent keyboard lockups.'

There may be a relation between keyboard problems and the video card in use.

Shawn K. Quinn (`skquinn@wt.net`) wrote: `I have a Zeos Pantera Pentium-90 that originally came with a Diamond Stealth 64 S3-based video card. Under X I frequently got q's inserted into my text (how annoying) especially if I typed very fast (during Netrek for instance, even more annoying because guess what that does :-( ). Switching to a Creative Labs Graphics Blaster MA202 solved the problem. I'm assuming the Stealth 64 did something funny with the timings.'

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