# Keyboard gone

## Diezel

This is something I've never seen before. I shutdown my little Gentoo box last night and now when booting the keyboard is "gone". It works if I want to access BIOS and when choosing kernel in Grub menu, but when the system has started. No keyboard.

I emerged Netbeans last night, tested it and shutdown -h now. And now, no go. I guess this could be fixed using the LiveCD but does anyone have a clue what just happend here  :Sad: 

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## DijiTao

if it's a usb keyboard you could try enabling legacy support in your bios.

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## Splink

Same here too. 

I rebooted my machine last night, went to bed, and now no keyboard. I have a ps2 one going via kvm switch.

The only thing I did change was enabling x11 pass through from sshd as I was messing about with a few things with X and win32 machines via ssh. Restarted the ssh service and everything seemed ok.

The keyboard is fine in the bios, and is fine when I boot of the cd. Cant understand why its suddenly just stopped working. 

I have eisa and isa support in the kernel. XT keyboard support, as well al pnp support. Has been working great, with no problems at all. This is with 2004.3 and not 2005.0.

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## johntramp

I sometimes get a similar problem with my mouse, but never with my keyboard.

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## Splink

Ok.

Found the root of my problem. 

If i plug in my usb mouse with my ps2 keyboard, then it does not work  :Smile: 

Anyone know how to get around this ?

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## Huey1

OK - let me muddy the waters!

I have a Gentoo 2.4.28-r5 from stage 1.

I have another disc set with Gentoo 2005.0  stage 3

I have had various adventures in between.

I find this "kernel sensitivity" blights other distros also.

I started to suspect that kernel 2.4 may be OK, and 2.6 was a problem when I was using a Knoppix disk as a workable way to build the Gentoo without a keyboard freeze. Knoppix had a 2.4 kernel, and I was happily using the nano editor, and doing "emerge<stuff>" from within the "chroot" environment in Konsole terminal. I also liked it because I could have Konqueror open to display the install docs, and middle button copy/paste The keyboard stayed OK the whole time.  When reboot time came, Gento fires up and goes like a rocket.. until we used a switcher to check the other box, and return to find keyboard frozen!

Possibly the most frustrating and inefficient way of testing to perceive kernel version correlation with problems is to do complete installs from scratch, looking for the effect of only one change at a time!!

Any use of my KVM switcher with any 2.6 kernel Gentoo leaves the keyboard hung.

Any messing with X, X11, framebuffer re-configs etc, leaves my keyboard hung.

Any use of  PS/2 mouse, even with 2.4 kernel,  in both KDE and fluxbox  has the wierd symptom that after a downclick, you need to move the mouse slightly (sideswipe) before it gets seen. Any multiple clicks before that are ignored.

I have to think that the keyboard handling / polling / interrupts etc.  is different in 2.6. About the same time as 2.6 arrived, so did the move from XFree86 to Xorg.  Something is different about keyboard handling. Please can somebody experienced at least point us to the best place to start looking where and how keyboards are serviced. I am real tired of changing KVM hardware on the possible chance that  it lives with 2.6 better. I am even more grim about any more Gentoo installs. The 2.4 kernel is not being supported anymore. We need to salvage the robust keyboard handling feature before the 2.4 knowledge is lost among the old CDs.

Huey1.

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## Splink

I have never used a 2.4 kernel, as I am a very recent user to linux. But I know I dont have this issue on a Mandrake box I am running, which is connected to the same kvm switch, but running 2.6.9

This problem for me is very inconsistent. Sometimes it is running ok, and I can reboot (like this morning) and the system will come back online fine. Last night, I rebooted several times, and everytime the keyboard would not be picked up. Sometimes the keyboard will input, but the keymap decides to have a frenzy. For example - typing "Hello" will probably give the results:

^6h55//*44////^777

Or something similar. My keymap settings never change either. And this was booting off a 2004.3 cd. I give up with 2005.0, I cant get any input at all.

The way I am working around it at the moment, is to shutdown the system, unplug everything (ps2 mouse, ps2 keyboard and usb mouse), Plug in my ps2 devices, switch to another active kvm screen, turn on my machine, go back to the gentoo screen from my kvm. Once kernel is loaded up ok, I plug in my usb mouse and hey presto everything works. 

I dont have to go through this exact process every time. Just a straight forward reboot will work at times (like this morning). Tbh, for the amount of times I reboot the machine, its probably not worth it. Its not like its a windows machine or something.

/me shrugs

And I dont think this is anything to do with xorg, as I only go into an init3 session and it locks there. I have changed some acpi settings to see if its anything to do with that. What I have notices though is that when the kernel image is decompressed and is booting, it scans the pci and the i/o devices at this point, and I see my optical light on my mouse flicker - at the same time the numlock comes on the keyboard, and stays on.

I still think its something to do with the kernel - or rather something I have not included in there. Ahh well - suppose Ill have to cope and do some more trail and error.

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