I work for a local theme park. We are converting all of the park's POS systems to linux and have run into an unexpected snag. The pos application runs under X-windows and seemed to work fine until we powered up a system with a "Cary" keyboard attached (this is a special retail keyboard with a large membrane keypad that can be programmed so that each membrane key returns a unique key sequence). The odd thing is that the OS starts up fine but when the application (in X-windows) starts up, the keyboard is not functional unless a mouse is attached to the computer. No keystrokes reach the application at all. If we boot up with a mouse attached, the keyboard works fine. If we boot up with no mouse but with the standard windows keyboard attached, the keyboard works fine! It's only if we come up with no mouse and a Cary keyboard attached that we run into the problem. Is there a solution to this problem? Perhaps something we need to do at start-up time to get the keyboard to work? The Cary keyboard is programmable and has ports to which you can connect other peripherals. For instance, a cash drawer is one peripheral for the keyboard. We discovered that we had to change the keyboard's software to NOT access the port for anything except the cash drawer in order to get it to work at all. Once we got past that problem, the keyboard seemed to work fine. As I mentioned above, the problem only occurs when the system boots up WITHOUT a mouse attached and WITH a Cary keyboard attached. This keyboard is particularly important at the fast-food outlets in the park where the membrane keys are programmed for the different food items sold (ie: 1 button for "Hamburger", another for "Fries" and-so-on). We are in contact with NRT (Cary's parent company) but are rapidly running out of time (the park opens for the season at the end of this month). Please respond directly to rschaeff@comcast.net if you have any experience with this type of keyboard. I will check the newsgroup but a direct reply is quicker. Rick Schaeffer (rschaeff@comcast.net)