• upon entering the HDD password on startup, the system said “wrong password”
• after three failed attempts, it offered a system self test, which failed to find a HDD: “Error code 2000-0141 No drive detected”
• Accordingly, not even the BIOS screen showed the HDD

At this point I thought there were only two possibilities: a) completely broken HDD or controller, b) cosmic rays garbled the password on the HDD

Wrong. It is the keyboard. On two keyboard ‘columns’, when pressing one key, the keyboard adds the corresponding character from the other column. Example: I press b, and “bv” appears on the screen. I press “v” and “vb” appears.

Argh ^^ Better than a b0rked HDD, though, because I dont do backups every day.

Update:
My guess was that I’d have to replace the keyboard. But no. Removing the keyboard, disassembling it and cleaning out (as best as possible) the filth of two years fixed it. Took me half a day. – There’s still a bad aftertaste, though, because I didnt find the reason. Maybe cleaning was unnecessary, and just re-attaching the connector would have sufficed?

How many laptops have been scrapped because of a dirty keyboard, one wonders.

had to install some packages:

sudo apt-get install autoconf libtool g++ libfreetype6-dev libsdl-dev

downloaded sources, went to source directory:


touch aclocal.m4 # necessary?
autoreconf -fi
./configure
make


now execute:

src/critterding

yay!

if (typeof Array.prototype.indexOf === 'undefined') {

	/**
	* 15.4.4.14
	* NOTE the second parameter fromIndex is not explicitly stated so that the
	*      method's length property becomes 1
	*
	* @param searchElement array element to be searched for
	* @param fromIndex (optional, integer)
	*/
	Array.prototype.indexOf = function (f) {
		var l = this.length,
			i = arguments[1] || 0;

		i += (i < 0) ? l : 0;

		for (i = Math.max(i, 0); i < l; i += 1) {
			if (this[i] === f) {
				return i;
			}
		}
		return -1;
	};
}

…außerdem gefällt mir dieses Syntax-Highlighting hier :D
to be extended…

Usage:

copy the file to ~/.kde/share/apps/katepart/syntax/
In Kate, select Extras->Highlighting->Other->eBook txt