all ya'll slackies are gonna love this mystery :-D

mrchaos · 07-08-2005, 02:13 PM

this is new to me: I've done about 20 or so installations of slackware 10.1 in the past six months. Ever since I started using the OS, all of my friends seem to want it too! What can I say, Slackware is contagious! Anyway, I just encountered something that I have never seen in 20 installations. It occurred when I attempted to install Slackware 10.1 on my friend's Pressario 2100 and I'm hoping there is someone who has solved this problem before:

I start by inserting the media into the CD-rom bay, and rebooting the computer. When the computer starts booting off the media, I boot off the normal kernel image on the cd without any options. However, every single time the boot gets to the part about the keyboard and "non-us keyboard" crap, the keyboard entirely stops functioning. It's not like this laptop has a international keyboard or anything like that... so I'm stuck. Am I right to assume that this has something to do with the bios setup? I'll have to experiment with that

spaceballs · 07-08-2005, 02:30 PM

Try this. After you choose the kernel, and the system begins to boot off of it, hold down a key on the laptop as it starts up and goes through all the runlevel scripts and detection scripts. It might work then when the machine is actually up. I don't know why this is, but I had an HP laptop that used to do this, too.

samac · 07-08-2005, 02:37 PM

A quick google found this

Quote:

Legacy USB support in Bios: System booted fine but keyboard went dead and occasionally worked if I had my finger on one of the keys, weird! After reading your web page one thing i really found useful was the disabling of legacy usb support in BIOS. This got rid of the dead keyboard problem on startup.

I don't know if this will help, but there are lots of examples of this laptop working with linux, on the net.

samac

mrchaos · 07-08-2005, 03:00 PM

haha... you guys are the kings of my chess board! Pressing down a key while the boot occured fixed the problem! Thanks a bunch.

jong357 · 07-08-2005, 06:21 PM

I think samac is on to something as well... I had to disable that in my desktops BIOS otherwise my keyboard wouldn't work. But only on 2.6 kernels which doesn't explain your Slack install on the lappy seeing as how a 2.4 is used. Food for thought. You should try to do a quick upgrade on that laptop to 2.6.x and see if the keyboard dies. If it does, Legacy USB is more than likely the culprit.

mrchaos · 07-08-2005, 10:26 PM

yeah, it's not the legacy usb that's the culprit.... that was one of the first things that I disabled in the bios.

wouldn't that be weird though? Why on earth would some laptop manufacturers want to connect their keyboards through the usb hub??

tmantist · 07-09-2005, 06:33 PM

Another problem solved.