Can't move cursor if I touch keyboard during boot.

[arinlares]

I'm a new Kubuntu user on a netbook (Asus EEE 1000HA), and have only one problem with this distribution right now that I would like some help with. If press any buttons on my keyboard at any time during the system's boot, the Plymouth boot screen changes to a text buffer (to be expected, if what I know about Plymouth is right), and it boots to the KDM screen fairly normally. Once there, the cursor just sits in the middle of the screen, not reacting to any actions on the touchpad. If I don't touch the keyboard at all, everything works normally.

So, has anybody seen this problem? What can I do about it? (Aside from not touching my keyboard during boot, that's easy )

[SteveRiley]

Hm. Well, two things.

1. Welcome to KFN.

2. The underlying X.org driver for touchpads is undergoing some not insignificant redevelopment at the moment. The effects of this are exceptionally notable in 12.10, the soon-to-be-released next version of *buntu: the System Configuration module for touchpads no longer works. It could be that some of the driver modifications have trickled down into 12.04 by now. Alas, I can't be certain of this, as I no longer run 12.04.

[steve7233]

I am runing 12.04.1 on an ASUS Eee 901 with no problems although i am using an external wireless optical keyboard/mouse so I haven't used the touch pad. I will try the touch pad now... The touch pad seems fine so far. i'll try it on the next reboot. It could be that arinlares, has a broken install. Mine got broke because I ran out of SSD space during the install.

[arinlares]

I have a 30GB root partition, and everything else works, so I don't think anything is broken or corrupted.

Assuming its just the driver, I never had this problem with my Debian Testing KDE install. Somehow, I think Plymouth might be the issue, possibly causing an input problem when I press a button. I'd like to check this out. Is there a safe way to easily disable plymouth without breaking my system?

[SteveRiley]

Somehow, I think Plymouth might be the issue, possibly causing an input problem when I press a button. I'd like to check this out. Is there a safe way to easily disable plymouth without breaking my system?

That would be curious indeed. You can find information about how to remove Plymouth in a couple places:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ll/+bug/556372
http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?55161

[arinlares]

sudo apt-get purge plymouth*

Yeah... No. That'll scrub the system. I just ran 'sudo apt-get autoremove plymouth' on this step, and it worked.

EDIT: Deleted what I had here because I now know exactly when *not* to touch the keyboard. I configured GRUB to use a boot menu (I prefer it), and rolling without plymouth, I can see more of what's going on. So, if I press any keys during the initial boot before the framebuffer shifts to the native resolution, my touchpad isn't useless. I don't want to mark this solved, since it isn't, but at least I have something useful to post about it.

I don't know much about how Ubuntu LTSs are handled (12.04 isn't supported by Blue Systems yet, is it?), but is there a chance of the "finished" driver, or updated xorg making its way in to the release, or even Kubuntu-Backports' ppa at some point? That might solve it.

[SteveRiley]

Hm... I'm certain when I typed those instructions before, adding the asterisk didn't cause a system-wide package removal. But I just ran a simulation on my 12.04 server (after adding the mediahacks PPA) and sure enough, plymouth* is interpreted as a regex that also picks up libplymouth2. Purging that will definitely be unfun. So I've changed my earlier post. Thanks for catching it.

The issue you've described sounds possibly unrelated to the work that's going on to fixi synaptiks, though. Sounds like a bug should be filed against xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.