Single ? mark in terminal

[PDP-8]

Is anyone running 32-bit Tinycore 10.1 seeing the same thing I am:

About 20 seconds or so after firing up the very first aterm, a random question mark will appear.

It will appear on it's own on a blank commandline, or sometimes right in the middle of my own typing.

But it occurs only once it seems, and all following instances of aterm never have this rogue question mark occur.

Weird.

[core-user]

Faulty keyboard, sticking key(?).

(I've never had it happen.)

[Rich]

Hi PDP-8
I'm running 10.1 and see no such behavior with  aterm.  Are you actually running  aterm  or another terminal that's been aliased to  aterm?

[PDP-8]

Just TinyCore 10.1 and the standard aterm.

I'm going to try and nail it down further.  This was noticed after helping Althus' Compaq Presario on my own similar box.

Hmm ... 64 bit box running 32-bit  TC?  Busybox quirk on my box only?  Some extension interaction with synaptics?  etc etc...

I'll try to nail it down to something specific, and most importantly repeatable.

[PDP-8]

Ok, we're repeatable:

It's starting to look some some sort of hardware quirk with this Compaq Presario CQ60z

It happens with 32 bit TC 10.1  (not tested on older releases)
It happens with 64 bit TinyCorePure64 10.1
Bare naked ISO's burned to different sticks with no additional extensions.

And, when booted to the command prompt only, it happens there too after about 20 seconds.

Fascinating, Jim.

Something in the Compaq is tickling the kernel late.  No amount of waitusb=xx fixes it either.

The solution for now seems to be just wait 30 seconds for the poltegeist-keystroke to appear and then move on.

I can't avoid it when booting to the command-prompt only, but in the gui environment, if I wait 30 seconds and fire up aterm, I never see it as the trigger for it has already passed.

[PDP-8]

[SOLVED]

It was acpi related.  Out of all the acpi disabling option, only a total disable prevented the errant ? from occurring when using this option in the boot line:

Code: [Select]

acpi=off
Thing is, now the machine won't power down - it will just halt and burn batteries.

Think I'll live with the ? showing up just once at boot.

[PDP-8]

Even better!  Backlights!

Researching the acpi on this old laptop led me to an accidental discovery - easy backlight control with the function keys!

So leaving acpi alone for the time being, I added these to the boot line

Code: [Select]

acpi_osi=Linux   acpi_backlight=vendor
Tada!  Function keys now easily control the backlight brightness on this box.  Thank you pesky ? mark !

[PDP-8]

Note - don't get too excited about thinking about making these two options a global change to all your other machines!

This was a bios/acpi total linux osi kludge-fest for just this machine.  Might work on others, but no guarantees due to the total mangling of the spec by various parties.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/firmware-guide/acpi/osi.html

Try it if you must, but it isn't a globally guaranteed fix you can rely on.