Keyboard shortcuts with <Alt>+<Fx> do not work in Ubuntu 12.04

[pberndt]

Since I updated to 12.04 customized keyboard shortcuts with <Alt>+<Fn> do no longer work. I can still modify the settings in System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts, but they are ignored.

I mapped Alt+F1 and Alt+F2 to custom applications and toggle maximize to Alt+F5. In both Unity and Gnome Shell, as a guest user (i.e. with a clean profile), the settings are ignored. In Gnome shell, Alt+F1 opens the overview, Alt+F2 opens the command window. In Unity, Alt+F2 opens the overview. I only tested Alt+F5 in Gnome shell: The window is never maximized, only the unmaximizing works.

In Gnome Shell, the settings do sometimes work right after I set them. If I for example set the Alt+F2 short cut, close the settings window and then press Alt+F2, nothing happens for the first few attemps and then one (!) window pops up eventually. After some time, the old behavior returns and Alt+F2 opens the command window again. After logging out, the settings are gone in any case.

[pberndt (phillip-berndt)]

Apparently also Alt+F3 is affected. I use this to open my browser. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I have not found out yet what exactly reproduces the problem here.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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[pberndt (phillip-berndt)]

This bug might be input driver related. I just tried to minesweeper. In this game, you have to press both mouse buttons simultaneously to clear known-to-be-empty fields. Every 2-5th time, the game does not recognize the button up event. (One can see this because minesweeper shows a different icon while the buttons are pressed. I can not reproduce this in xev, so maybe this is even gnome/gtk specific?)

[pberndt (phillip-berndt)]

Further update: Apparently the keyboard settings are now scattered between gconf and dconf. The tool seems to only change the settings in gconf, while at least gnome shell uses dconf's org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings. (This is probably worth its own bug? Should I open another one?)

Removing the wrong Alt+Fn settings from there helped a lot. All key bindings work again sometimes, but still not continously.

[Andrea Azzarone (azzar1)]

Can you still reproduce this bug?

[pberndt (phillip-berndt)]

Its been over 2 years.. I currently don't use either WM anymore and therefore can't tell, sorry.