First post, forgive me if this has been covered, but if it has I was unable to come up with the right search terms for it.
I have several Dell AT101 keyboards (not AT101W) that I've been using for literally decades. I've always struggled with USB to PS/2 converters, having to often unplug and replug when the keyboard inevitably quit working. Which has, way too late is seems, led me to discovering the Soarer's keyboard adapter. I'm not particularly concerned with remapping or macros (yet) I just want a more stable experience, and I have been led to believe this is the way to go.
I bought two premade adapters from an eBay seller, and hooked the first up to my Windows 10 machine at work. So far, it works perfectly, but I don't have a whole lot of hours on it yet. Where I'm having problems is at home on my Xubuntu Linux machine. There, I am having two annoying problems.
First, I cannot get SHIFT ARROW functionality. When in an editor, I often use SHIFT RIGHT or SHIFT DOWN to highlight text, then CTRL C to copy it. With the cheap PS/2 converter this works fine, but with the Soarer's converter, it does not. Other SHIFT functions, like accessing capital letters or punctuation characters work fine.
I downloaded hid_listen (and the 32 bit libusb needed to run it) for Linux and checked out what was going on. What I saw was when I pressed either shift key, I got a + code, and when I released it I got the corresponding - code. Same with the arrow keys, press get + code, release get - code, all as expected. When I pressed either shift and then one of the direction arrows, however, what I saw was first the - code for the shift, then the + code for the arrow. This would explain why I can't use that key combination for highlighting, I suppose, but why would I see that in the first place? And more importantly, how can I make it stop?
Also, this doesn't happen on the one on the Windows 10 machine at work, or at least I can SHIFT arrow highlight there anyway, I didn't hid_listen that combo as there was no need to.
I thought maybe the unit I bought may have had someone else's config file loaded into it, so I tried to use scrd to read out the current config file. That's where I run into my second problem. Whenever I use any of the utility programs, it appears to function, but then the keyboard freezes. No more typing until I unplug the USB cable and put it back in. I don't know if this is normal behavior on Linux or not. I do have to use sudo to execute the commands.
Unfortunately I'm about to have a knee replacement surgery, and left the other unit at work and won't be able to go back for it for at least three weeks, so I can't swap them to see if the bad behavior stays with the converter or with the keyboard. Both are the same model, purchased at the same time, so I doubt it is the keyboard, but I suppose it could be.
Any help or suggestions appreciated.