Hello,

I just installed RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.3 on a new system. When booting I see two error messages:
After it gets into the first-boot GUI, my keyboard and mouse are not working. They don't even seem to be powered.

How do I troubleshoot this? Thank you.

P.S. My USB keyboard and mouse works in BIOS and the RHEL GUI installer. I also removed all other USB devices and made sure my keyboard/mouse are connected directly (not through a hub). Trying different ports didn't help.

Sounds like an incomplete installation of the X system, since you've ruled out the hardware. Have you tried leaving them unplugged, and plugging them in after booting? Try booting in text-only mode (runlevel 3), and work in the console, and run through the installation steps for X:
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5238

..or by running (as root)

And what does Red Hat support say? You're using RHEL 7.3, so you must be paying for it, right?

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Thanks @TB0ne. I actually don't get support because I'm signed up with their free of charge developer subscription.

I tried plugging in my keyboard/mouse *after* boot but no difference there. As for booting into the console, my keyboard and mouse shuts down as soon as I leave the GRUB menu so I don't know how to get to the text only mode.

BTW, since this is a clean installation I just re-installed the whole OS, but still the same results... Anything else I can try?

If you're not paying for support, then loading CentOS would be much better. Also, checking the Red Hat knowledgebase would get you some good answers:
https://access.redhat.com/documentat...UB_2_Menu.html

Instead of keying "emergency" as it says in the example, just put a 3. You can run your yum updates/re-installs from there.
Again, since your hardware is working, this leaves software, and since it only happens in the GUI, that leaves you back to an incomplete GUI installation. The better question here is, why are you using RHEL 7 in the first place? RHEL isn't really suited well for 'consumer' hardware, but is more for back-end servers. Any development work you do on something like Fedora, Debian, or openSUSE should be pretty portable between most distros. I'd still use CentOS 7.x instead of RHEL developer, though.

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This is strange (but good)... I re-installed a couple more times, each time slightly tweaking the settings. In the end by changing the Security Policy to something else made my USB devices work, not sure why...

Anyway, I see your point about choice of OS. I just wanted to install RHEL and learn about it as practice. The free-of-charge subscription comes of software updates, is there another reason why CentOS (or its derivatives?) is better in this case? Is it easier to get support for CentOS?

I'm not sure switching to CentOS would help. Several people seem to have this problem, and one solved it by switching from CentOS to Red Hat! This seems to be one of those rare problems that hasn't really been tackled yet.

One of my dicta is "if in doubt, suspect SELinux". Try adding selinux=0 to the kernel parameters in Grub and see what happens.

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Right now easier? No. In 12 months when your 'free' subscription has to be renewed (not a hard process), it's fine too. But to me, it would be too much of a pain to all of a sudden lose my updating/installing capabilities, until I go through a web-form, sign in, etc. Too much hassle for a development box. CentOS starts free and remains so. For a PRODUCTION server? Absolutely worth RHEL, but pay for support. If you're just learning, you can pretty much just pick ANY linux distro. The differences between them are fairly small, and you'll have the same tools available to you. For example, I use openSUSE, and it uses zypper, where RHEL/CentOS/Fedora use yum. Same thing, but different. If you learn RHEL and go some place where SuSE Enterprise is used, you'll still have to deal with a little learning curve. Just my opinion....I'd not use a server-class OS for development, but each to their own.

And I'm with DavidMcCann here, and didn't even think of selinux, but it makes total sense. When I poked at things on the RHEL site, it alluded to the X system missing a component, which is why I answered as I did.

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Might look at this page for some things to try. https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7590

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