I just started using a Dell Optiplex 9020. I noticed that my Kinesis Advantage keyboard will stop working every 10 minutes or so. Simply unplugging it then plugging it back in fixes the problem but this is incredibly disruptive. I have tried different ports, front, back, and the monitor hub (trying both the ports marked with SS and those without) but nothing seems to make a difference. This does not happen with the Dell keyboard that came with the computer so I wonder if this keyboard wants more power and the computer stops providing it after a while. I have used this keyboard without any problems on 3 other computers so I know it is a good keyboard. Any ideas?
I saw Dell offers a driver (published a year ago) for Ubuntu 12.04 which I may try despite the difference in revisions, I am using 14.04. It seems strange as this seems very Windows-ish to me to install a manufacturer driver.
2 Answers
The problem was an obscure bug specific to Kinesis Advantage keyboards. Kinesis tech support said others had similar behavior using Ubuntu when using programmable macros. It is not clear why but for some hardware, when using a macro, the keyboard gets shutoff (no usb power).
I resolved the issue by deleting a macro I had set inadvertently (it was not actually set to do anything which is why it took so long to figure out what was happening).
The problem I had was the aggressive power management my laptop was doing, to work around it I did the following:
lsusbto find the device id- search for AUTOSUSPEND_USBID_BLACKLIST in /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/usb-autosuspend.conf and add the device id in there.
