Keyboard & mouse not responding?

Enfield · 12 Oct 2009 at 19:45

Hi guys,

I have Gentoo installed on my main PC but haven't been using it for a few days as I have recently installed a new 500GB hard disk for XP (gaming).

I don't as yet use a boot loader which will boot me into one or the other so am making do with just simply unplugging one drive whilst I use the other.

Going back to Gentoo again my keyboard and mouse are not responding (cannot even turn the numlock on), however if I press 'I' too boot into interactive mode it works fine. This leads me to believe that there is something wrong with xorg. Slim loads up fine so it can't be the driver (nvidia).

The only thing I have changed since it last worked was two settings in the BIOS. One was the AGP apeture size and the other the performance mode, i.e. Turbo or standard. Now I changed these back to what they once were but the problem is still persisting so that's that idea out the window.

Apologies if this is a stupid thread but I can't get my head round why Gentoo is throwing a hissy fit!

Please help, as I don't want to get back to using XP for anything other than gaming.

.walls · 12 Oct 2009 at 21:07

Sounds like you've recently updated Xorg and haven't updated your config. Happened to me a while back when I upgraded.

Make sure you have xorg-input-evdev or whatever and reconfig your xorg: boot into single user and rename your xorg.conf, then restart xdm. If that does not allow you to start xdm, then X -configure and copy the new config to the appropriate place.

Also - the new xorg disables x zapping (ctrl + alt + backspace), so you might want to add that to your conf as well.

Enfield · 12 Oct 2009 at 21:25

Legend.

I'll give it a go.

Enfield · 18 Oct 2009 at 20:20

It didn't work.

steve-h · 18 Oct 2009 at 20:30

try commenting out your keyboard/mouse in xorg.conf

Enfield · 18 Oct 2009 at 20:56

That didn't work either.

.walls · 18 Oct 2009 at 21:08

right... will need a bit more info then; like your X version and details of any errors/warnings in your X logs for a start.

The latest version in portage requires both evdev and hal - the latter needs to be running and you need to have xf86-input-evdev installed as well. hal should detect that you have a mouse and keyboard connected and configure X to use evdev as the drivers (as opposed to the old way of assuming there was a mouse and keyboard and using the xf86-input-mouse / keyboard drivers). Bit of a pain to start with - but the end result is much improved input handling.

EDIT: your kernel will need to support evdev as well, btw.