Installing FC 8 from DVD, I'm stuck at the installation screen and neither my usb keyboard nor mouse are recognized. I know they work, as the machine is dual-boot and they work in Windows just fine. I'd try a PS/2 keyboard, but the machine has no PS/2 ports.

Suggestions on how to get around this? Anything short of locating and buying a PCI card that will give me a PS/2 port and borrowing a keyboard? I really don't know for sure that that's my problem. Aaargh! Installing should have been the simple part!!


- Van

If you can you could try loaning a friend's USB keyboard (in case it's of different model) to see if it's that specific keyboard model of yours that doesn't work with that particular version of the installer. There are also usb-to-ps2 plugs, but because the port still remains the same I guess they won't make any difference..

You could also make a kickstart file and thus automate the installation by writing your own custom version of the setup disc set, but I guess that's a bit of an overkill

So your keyboard goes completely numb, even ctrl+alt+f1 (or del?) don't do anything? That sounds somewhat amazing..I always thought usb (or any) connected keyboards would be one of the simplest cadgets you can plug onto a computer these days. Excluding mice.

I found a way around my problem.

The keyboard was dead at the graphical Fedora screen where it says "Install or upgrade an existing system" etc, etc. Nothing could cure that, not even an answer I googled about enabling "Legacy USB Mode" in the BIOS (there is no such option in my BIOS).

Just before that comes up. flashing by so fast that I almost missed it even when I was looking at the screen at that exact moment, is the text linux install screen that says "To install Linux in graphical mode, type ENTER" "To install Linux in text mode type LINUX TEXT" etc, etc. It took me several reboots to figure this out. Apparently ENTER was being auto-selected every time that came up and the screen was bypassed near-instantaneously.

Holding down SPACE as I booted stopped me there and I then had the chance to enter LINUX TEXT. Obviously the keyboard was working, short of graphic mode. I then installed in text mode and it went fine.

Resulting machine was not able to boot to runlevel 5 or start X-Windows manually, but I'll ask about that if I can't figure it out on my own.

First, the updates ...

Thanks,

Van