No touchpad no keyboard.

[Somatose]

I've been running 10.04 since the upgrade and haven't had this problem so I am kind of baffled. My computer was working fine, I left it on, came back about an hour later went to wake it up and now my keyboard and pointer don't work. I can't get a terminal to pull up. Everything loads, but then I can't do anything.

Any help is appreciated.

[GreyGeek]

Re: No touchpad no keyboard.

A little more specifics on the details would be helpful.

Computer make and model, etc...

What do you mean that "everything loads"? Are you getting the KDE desktop?

So, either you are dual booting and posting your msg from another OS, or you are using another computer? Do the Magic SysRq keys work? (You may think your keyboard is not working but it may still be accepting keystrokes, at least until the keyboard buffer is full.)

"Raising Elephants" mnemonic device

A common idiom to perform a safe reboot of a Linux computer which has otherwise locked up, the QWERTY (or AZERTY) mnemonic "Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring", "Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken" or simply remembering the word "BUSIER" backwards, is often useful.[5] It stands for

unRaw (take control of keyboard back from X),
tErminate (send SIGTERM to all processes, allowing them to terminate gracefully),
kIll (send SIGKILL to all processes, forcing them to terminate immediately),
Sync (flush data to disk),
Unmount (remount all filesystems read-only),
reBoot.

This can prevent a fsck being required on reboot and gives some programs a chance to save emergency backups of unsaved work.

While holding the Alt + SysRq key combination down, touch R E I S U B in that order. When you touch B your computer should reboot. This will prevent loss of data or the need for a journal replay.

What happens when you boot a Kubuntu LL LiveCD? Does that DE work OK?

[Somatose]

Re: No touchpad no keyboard.

Sorry for the lack of details, and thank you for the reply. Unfortunately I'm a pretty ignorant to the linux system so the help is greatly appreciated.

It is an Acer Aspire 5100.

I am posting this from a different computer, the one having the problem has 10.04 as the only OS.

By "everything loads" I mean that the computer boots up, as far as I can tell anyway, but when I get to the log in screen I can not input anything. The only button that seems to work is the power button. If I hit that then it terminates and shut down regularly.

When I try the R E I S U B nothing happens.

I don't have a Live CD burnt, I will start getting one done now.

One more thing that is probably nothing, but I guess I might as well include is that I do not think the Bluetooth light on my computer has normally come on in the past. Again though, maybe it has and I just never noticed, but now it is on when the log in screen comes up.

Thanks again

[GreyGeek]

Re: No touchpad no keyboard.

Making sure both the ISO and the burned CDROM are good is paramount before one begins installing ANY distro.

But, and it saddens me to tell you this, there are LOTS of problems with the Acer Aspire 5100 attempting to run Linux. Just run a Google search for ' Linux "acer aspire 5100" ' and see what I mean. An unusually large number of folks running XP on it, and some Win7, are having problems. (get rid of XP or Windows problems by adding " -xp -windows" to the google search string.

The Acer Aspire 5100 has a legacy video chip that is no longer supported by the latest ATI Catalyst 10.1 driver, and the most recent driver that supported it, now retired in the ATI archives, is NOT compatible with recent kernels. So, you are in a catch-22. The best you can hope for is a VESA video driver without 3D acceleration. Here is a link describing the situation. It seems that Upstart doesn't know what to make of that video chip and what it does end up doing doesn't work.

A way around that is to use a LiveCD distro that includes a manual video configuration application, like Mandriva, and using its XFDrake to configure an xorg.conf file. Then, from the LiveCD, you can then mount your HD and copy the xorg.conf file to your /etc/X11 directory on your HD. In fact, you might want to play with the PCLinuxOS 2010 release using its LiveCD for an hour or two and see how your Acer works with it.

I find the behavior of the Acer Aspire 5100 puzzling because I've purchased three Acer Aspire 3000 series laptops and on all three Kubuntu fits like a silk glove. My wife and son are each using one of them now.

[Somatose]

Re: No touchpad no keyboard.

Looks like I bet on the wrong pony with the 5100!

Thank you for all the info. I will start trying some stuff out. Thanks again, I really appreciate it.