Re: [tlug] keyboard behavior changed

[Thomas Blasejewicz <nyuwa@example.com>]

On 2019/09/21 23:06, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> Not to blame the victim, but is there any chance you did some upgrades
> just *before* converting the PC to dust-collector?  Mint is a Debian-kei
> distro, so the top line of "ls -lt /var/cache/apt/archives | head" may
> tell you when you last downloaded packages.  If that messed up your
> config, it might persist through the distro version-up (Debian-kei
> distros are generally pretty careful about preserving current configs
> across upgrades).
>
> If you can tell us if there's anything suspicious that upgraded
> "recently", that would help.
I tried the command you gave me, but it showed only the changes I made 
the day before.

After that (unable to fix the problem) I newly installed Mint 19.2 
(before it was 19).
Since I made a mistake somewhere, so that the partition with my data was 
not "home", I reinstalled again:
1) OS into a root partition (100 GB) + 220 GB /home = 50% full.
Installed all available updates + Japanese language support (language 
icon does not show)

The system (no other OS present) now always starts with the Grub menu - 
which it did not do before and does not in 2 other machines running Mint.
* sometimes neither keyboard nor mouse respond at all
* after waking up from a suspend, I often get a cursor looking like four 
rectangles forming a cross with a white square in the middle (never seen 
that before)
    -> if this pops up, the computer remains totally unreponsive, while 
that funny cursor keeps flickering; after that, it sometimes recovers
* Crtl+Alt -> ALWAYS brings up the shutdown menu (NOT the default), so 
that "Ctrl+Alt" cannot be used for any other shortcut.
* apparently a whole bunch of other unexpected quirks happen without any 
discernable pattern.

Should I presume, the PC is broken somehow?
Maybe looking for a "new" (junk) PC is then the easiest/fastest way out
(this one my daughter bought when she started university 10 years ago 
and gave me to play with)

Or is there still some magic trick I could try?
Thank you
Thomas