I have a Toshiba Satellite C850D with AMD Radeon HD graphics and 6GB of Ram with Ubuntu 13.10.

However, when I boot it sometimes the touch pad and keyboard do not work. I can eventually get them to work my continually restarting my computer.

First, I tried previous versions other than my 13.10. I tried 13.04 and 12.04. Seeing that the keyboard, nor did the touch pad work on these live CDs... I figured it must be a driver issue.

To rectify this, I checked that I did have a synaptic touch pad.


egrep -i 'synap|alps|etps' /proc/bus/input/devices
N: Name="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"


Seeing that this is the case, I tried installing the missing driver.


sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
xserver-xorg-input-synaptics is already the newest version.
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
cinnamon-common consolekit geany-common gir1.2-accountsservice-1.0
gir1.2-caribou-1.0 gir1.2-clutter-1.0 gir1.2-cogl-1.0 gir1.2-coglpango-1.0
gir1.2-gdesktopenums-3.0 gir1.2-gkbd-3.0 gir1.2-gnomedesktop-3.0
gir1.2-json-1.0 gir1.2-muffin-3.0 gir1.2-polkit-1.0 gir1.2-upowerglib-1.0
gir1.2-xkl-1.0 gjs libcaribou-common libcaribou0 libck-connector0 libgjs0d
liblastfm1 libmozjs-17.0-0 libmuffin0 libpam-ck-connector libphonon4 libqca2
libqca2-plugin-ossl libqjson0 linux-image-generic muffin-common phonon
phonon-backend-gstreamer projectm-data python-pyxattr
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 41 not upgraded.


However, it appears that the drivers are up to date.

I tried this when my keyboard and touch pad was responsive;


xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ TOSHIBA Web Camera - HD id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]


I don't know what else to do and all I can assume that my computer is not consistently recognizing my input devices.

Is there any other way of resolving this issue?


Thank you.

Hi

For the keyboard & mouse & whatever to work in X 2 things have to happen:
1) the Linux kernel has to recognize them and use the appropriate modules.
2) X has to find them and load the appropriate modules/drivers.
Therefore the first thing I would try to do would be to check if the Linux kernel has found those devices.

The easiest way to test if the kernel if ok with the devices would be for you to kill X (if I remember correctly the key combination to kill X is ctrl+alt+backspace, but I'm not sure) and then you should fall back into the pure "console" mode and then you can just try to type something and see if it works => if it does than your problem is only with X.
(Or maybe you can even select a boot option to go directly into console mode without starting up X?)
Alternatively, if you have a second PC/notebok available, connect to the not-working PC/notebook using SSH (you might have to set it up...).

If you're connecting remotely from a different PC then do a "cat /dev/input/event[try_every_single_one]" and then try to type something on the physical keyboard connected to the not-working-pc and try to move the mouse => if you see garbage showing up in the console it means that the keyboard or mouse was recognized by the kernel.
If nothing happens than you have a big problem, but it's very unlikely.
If you do see something then it's just a matter of configuring X11 correctly so that it finds them. This would be a separate chapter.
Cheers!

Btw., the behaviour you describe might happen when using a KVM between PC and the devices => the problem you describe is related to the physical keyboard & mouse of your notebook, right?

Yes, the issue pertains to the keyboard and mouse on my laptop.

I tried the keyboard shortcut, "ctrl+alt+bkspace" and from what I observed, it made no difference to the performance at all. (I confirmed the method on Google.)

In addition, along with the Ubuntu live CDs I mentioned previously, I tried a Fedora live CD after posting this thread and the keyboard and trackpad worked just fine on it.

So, based on this information, would you say it is an issue of configuring X11?

Thank you for your help.

Well, you should really try this out:
If the keyboard/mouse reacts when you try them out with "cat /dev/input/event[X]" then it could be for example that your X-configuration as a specific "/dev/input/event[X]" hardcoded in your X-configuration and the "X" might vary between reboots and that would be the reason why X works with mouse & keyboard only from time to time... .

Cheers

Unfortunately, my other computer is now being a pain by not letting me install anything. However that is another matter for another day.

I will eventually do the ssh diagnostics but how would you configure the X11 files, if that may be the case?

Sorry and thank you.

You should check if you have a file called "xorg.conf" lying around.
Mine is in "/etc/X11/xorg.conf", yours might be somewhere else depending on your distribution/installation.

I you find it see if you find sections for the keyboard/mouse similar to this one:
If you do you might want to check if the "/dev/input/[whatever]" is valid (if the file exists and if you do a "cat /dev/input/[whatever]" and moving your mouse / typing on your keyboard returns something). If not, it might be enough to delete/comment out that line (or maybe the whole section or even the whole file - in any case take first a backup of that file) to force Xorg to autodetect the device(s)... .

Sorry for not replying sooner. I am going to try and remove this file now.

However. I am am currently trying

sudo rm -r -f /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d
-r to delete everything and -f for force.

It has remove the file but then would Xorg just automatically detect the devices now or do I have to reboot? (my mouse and keyboard are working just fine now)

Yeah, don't do that. I just rebooted and I had to reintall everything (good thing I always do a back up).
Whops.

I am having trouble configuring my xorg files and is there any other method of making it detect my keyboard and mouse consistenly on my computer?