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I have just installed Ubuntu on an HP Probook. However, the built-in keyboard fails to register keystrokes from both shift keys, both control keys, both alt keys, and the function key. There is no output from xev when these keys are pressed.

As per this post from 2020 and this solution/workaround from the same year, I ran the command suggested in this answer, that is cat /sys/class/dmi/id/chassis_type which gave an output 10. I then blacklisted the intel_vbtn module and rebooted the system; however, the keys remain unresponsive.

I'm unsure what to try next, so I'm making a post here. I think it's important to mention that this laptop's shift and other keys did work fine in windows, before I installed Ubuntu; Also, I tried to install alpine linux before I installed Ubuntu, but actually gave up because the shift keys weren't working. I just assumed that Ubuntu would probably work out of the box; but the problem seems to be exactly the same, which leads me to believe it might be a kernel issue.

edit-- as per the comment, I have tried sudo evtest. the full output is very long so i won't add it here. i will add some excerpts of the output that i thought might be relevant;

it lists the keyboard as /dev/input/event4: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard

it does show the shift key and other function keys as existing in the keyboard, eg, Event code 97 (KEY_RIGHTCTRL) or Event code 42 (KEY_LEFTSHIFT) in the list of all keys when i select the keyboard from the list initially;

holding down or pressing shift or any of the other malfunctioning keys has no effect [there is no output], just like in xev.

edit 2-- as per the suggestion in comment, i tried seeing if the keyboard worked in grub line editor. it did not. while holding shift, capitals were not registered. grub is at version 2.12

edit 3-- with regards to the layout possibly being the problem, i did manually try several different options. using xfce4-keyboard-settings, i navigated to the layout tab, where i changed the option for 'keyboard model' from generic 101-key pc to every other generic option, as well as every listed hewelett-packard laptop option. the shift key didn't work with any of them. during instalation, i also tried changing the language layout from English-us, to every other english-us layout, eg- english [dvorak], english [colomak], and so forth. the shift key did not work with any of them. i did not try any non-english layouts.

D Backstrom
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  • Is there output after doing sudo apt install evtest, and selecting your keyboard from sudo evtest? – Daniel T Jan 29 '24 at 23:34
  • apologies for not capitalising anything and using square braces for everything but i am currently writing on the busted keyboard, so capitals are only available to me through the caps lock function – D Backstrom Jan 30 '24 at 15:59
  • We have determined that the problem is with the kernel/firmware/hardware, and not a keyboard layout problem. If it's ever fixable in software, then need to find either the right keyboard driver or the right settings for it. Does it work in GRUB? If you press ESC during boot so much that it goes to a command line screen with grub>, does the shift key work if you try to type uppercase? – Daniel T Jan 30 '24 at 21:54

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