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Caps-Lock as Control no longer triggers reliably after upgrade to 20.04 (Lenovo UK keyboard layout)

in flag
MRule

Some years ago I mapped CapsLock to control to help treat a repetitive strain injury. This stopped working after updating to Ubuntu 12.04. For example, to paste in the terminal, one types shift+control+v. Before the upgrade to 20.04, this worked. Now, it enters a capital letter V.

Near as I can tell, what's happening is that shift+control is read as shift, but only when typing using CapsLock mapped to control. Everything works fine when typing using the actual control keys

This is definitely a bug, since it was working in the previous version, and since it only affects control when typed via the CapsLock key. Would anyone happen to have any leads on how to fix this? Besides installing an earlier version of Ubuntu?

Edit: I'm no longer sure this is a "bug" in the usual sense; It seems to be an issue with preserving the language settings across a distribution upgrade. Since distribution upgrades are routinely known to break many things, it's not clear that this is entirely unexpected behavior. I suppose the bug might be... if you somehow manage to get your configuration into an inconsistent state where it can't load the correct keyboard layout, then modifier keys also behave strangely.

Many thanks in advance!

> cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=20.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=focal
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS"
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guiverc avatar
cn flag
guiverc
Ubuntu 12.04 upgraded to 12.10 (the next release) or 14.04 (ie. the next LTS release) and did not have an upgrade path to 20.04 except by many *release-upgrades* over many years. Your mention of the two very different releases makes little sense given the 8 year and many *release-upgrades* required between them. It reads like a possible user-created issue by upgrading outside of supported & QA-tested upgrade paths.
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guiverc avatar
cn flag
guiverc
Bug reports should be [reported on Launchpad])https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs) so that developers can see, track and fix these issues. https://askubuntu.com/help/on-topic
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in flag
MRule
Thanks! See my answer and let me know if you think this is a bug worth reporting; I'm not sure I would be able to reproduce it, since I don't know how the UK language settings got lost in the upgrade.
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guiverc avatar
cn flag
guiverc
My (badly formatted due bad edit) Bug reports comment was a close vote as *bug reports* are off-topic here as belong on bug trackers, and Ubuntu uses Launchpad. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS reached EOL (*end of standard support*) back in April-2017 (*continuing life a few more years via ESM; but that only upgraded to 14.04 same as the LTS did*).
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in flag
MRule
Ok; I started preparing an account for launchpad, but after an hour or so I had to get back to work. I already spent several hours of work-time troubleshooting the keyboard issue and I will miss deadlines if I spend any more time on this :/ In my experience such a bug report will usually be wholly ignored as "cannot reproduce" and waste both mine and the developer's time, in the end. :S
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in flag
MRule

It seems like Ubuntu lost the UK language support during the upgrade, reverting instead to US English. This silently removed support for UK keyboard layouts. I don't know how this broke the modifier keys, but it did.

Here's what I did to fix things:

  • Go to Control Center → Personal → Language Support
  • Click "install/remove language" and add "UK English" as a language
  • Drag "UK English" to the top of them menu
  • Reboot
  • Navigate to Control Center → Hardware → Keyboard
  • Go to the "Layouts" tab
  • Click "+ Add" and add UK English
  • Remove US English
  • Click "Reset to Defaults"
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