I recently switched to Slackware from Mandrake and I couldn't be more pleased. Any issues I've had I found solutions for through this community and I thank all posters for that. One problem I've had recently that I have not seen a solution for (It could be my lack of search skill) is while running Slackware on my Presario 2100 laptop, I cannot get the keyboard to work in runlevel 3. It works fine in KDE terminal and any software package included while working under X. It's just when I boot into runlevel 3 that I have the issue. It's not a huge inconvienience, I just thought I might like to start outside of the GUI. Thanks for any help. Oh, and I am a noob so I may not have all the correct terms down yet. I hope this post was understandable.

You could always log-on as root and open up a text editor, navigate to /etc/inittab and change the following entry from

to:

Save the file, then exit. Reboot your computer and you will boot into a graphical log-in screen where your keyboard should be fine (run level 4). You can always change your inittab back to run level three if you like.
That's a strange issue you're having. Good luck with that.

What do you mean exactly by the keyboard not working?

In runlevel 3, can you login once booting completes and the login prompt appears? If yes, then at what point thereafter does the keyboard fail?

If you cannot use the keyboard to even login, can you three-finger salute (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to reboot?

When I say that it does not work I mean I type any key combination including ctrl-alt-del and nothing happens, no text appears on screen or anything. The way I got the whole system up and running to start with is by plugging another keyboard into the ps/2 slot. I then set up Slack and set the innitab to runlevel 4 and the laptop keyboard began to work. If I switch back to runlevel 3 now, the issue remains that the laptop keyboard simply will not work. This isn't a huge deal like I say, because I can work from within KDE, but what I'm trying to do is really get to know Linux completely and I thought by working solely from the shell for the time being would help. Thank you for the quick replies.

You mentioned using a laptop and then later attaching an external keyboard. I have no experience with GNU/Linux and laptops, but my guess is that the boot process is not finding the laptop keyboard but is instead looking at the usual external ports for the keyboard.

Why the keyboard functions properly in X/KDE likely is related to the fact that X includes a lot of keyboard support and probably finds the laptop keyboard with no issues.

So the problem seems to be in why the Linux kernel is not finding the internal keyboard.

Hopefully some other experience people here can pitch in and help, but for starters, boot into X/KDE. Then, using a text editor, inspect the various logs located at /var/log. Some important logs to browse are dmesg, messages, and syslog. Look for any obvious error messages about the keyboard. Start from the end of each log file as the end of the file will be the most recent. Work your way backwards into the log file to look for repeating error messages. From there you should be able to search the web for the error message found.

A quick Google search revealed several possible solutions. One potential solution is disabling of legacy usb support in the BIOS.

I also found this thread here at linux questions:Presario 2100