Fedora 16 Keyboard Input Problem (not ibus?)

[djmorton42]

Hello All.

I have been playing around with game development using Java and the built in Graphics2D APIs for a while now and I decided I wanted to try  switching over to lwjgl (specifically with the Slick2D wrapper).  I've had no problem getting rendering to work, but I've been pulling my hair out trying to get keyboard input working.

I am running Fedora 16 x64 and I've tried using a variety of OpenJDK and HotSpot 32 and 64 bit VMs.

Firstly, I get the common permissions problems where /dev/input/event* can't be opened.  Using:

sudo chmod go=u /dev/input/event

I am able to resolve that, and then, running my application, the console logging reports:

Linux plugin claims to have found 7 controllers
Sun Jan 15 18:24:40 EST 2012 INFO:Found 0 controllers

The application runs, but no keyboard input will work (presumbably that's related to the "Found 0 controllers" logging message).

I have read on several threads that ibus typically causes this problem.  I dug around for a while, and thanks for Gnome3's lack of configurability, I can't seem to find any way to disable it.  Additionally, I couldn't find any process ibus-daemon that many of the other threads talk about killing.  So, I figured I don't really care much about the functionality that ibus provides, so I just uninstalled it (sudo yum erase ibus).  I still have no luck with keyboard input however.  Just to be sure, I restarted my system and still no luck.

I also saw several threads that suggested that a workaround was to run the application as root or using sudo (although I wasn't sure if this was to work around the permissions issue that the chmod above resolves, or whether this was to avoid the ibus issue)... I tried running my application as root (and via sudo) and I got the exact same result (although I had to switch to OpenJDK to get this to work... it had trouble loading the native libraries under the HotSpot VM)... "Found 0 controllers" and no keyboard input will work.

Lastly, I also tried upgrading my application to use the latest lwjgl and jinput versions instead of the older versions that come with Slick2D.  Still no dice.

I would really like to get this working, and I can't seem to figure out any other solutions.  I would really appreciate any help anyone could offer.

Dan