So I am pretty new to this whole "Linux thing." I decided to try installing Evil Entity- I know that everyone says that it's not a good distro for noobs like me, that I should try something different, but honestly, Evil Entity is just cool. I would rather just spend a little more time screwing around with it than installing another distro first.

But that said, I do have a question or three. See, the install seemed to go alright- I partitioned my drive, mounted my swap partition, all that good stuff. I have an ATI Radeon 9700, so I selected "Generic VGA" for my video card. For mouse, I select "Microsoft compatible mouse," and for keyboard, I select "Generic 104 key" or whichever one that is. All through, my PS/2 keyboard works just fine.

When I logon to X, my keyboard and mouse stop working. I am using a USB mouse, and a USB keyboard. I also have a PS/2 keyboard plugged in because command line stuff doesn't seem to work with USB keyboards, or if it does I certainly don't know how to make it. The numlock light won't even come on.
I have tried reinstalling using various different configurations, and it's always the same- I log on as user, see the desktop even, but I can't do anything after that because my input devices are screwed. I tried getting at my FreeX86 file to try and edit it or something, but whenever I open it it just scrolls all the categories (mouse, keyboard, etc) and says "command not found" or something.

I heard somewhere that Evil Entity didn't support USB, that i would need to recompile the kernel for that to happen. I don't want to do this; would a USB to PS/2 converter work? Also, this does not explain why the PS/2 keyboard doesn't work.
Can you please tell me what I am doing wrong? Am I just destined to not use this distro, it being forever out of reach, too hardcore for me to grasp? I appreciate the help.

I am not very experienced, so I can only suggest the obvious - try a PS/2 or serial mouse. Also try different settings when installing (try the simplest possible mouse setting).

Next, check logs. dmesg, then the logs in /var/log. Also watch the screen while booting, and see if anything odd appears.

From what you wrote, I suspect the second step will have shown very little as it is probably an X problem. Try exiting X (if necessary by Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) and see what messages you get - apart from the messages generated by crashing out!

I hope this is of some help - I have just installed EvilEntity, and am searching the forums for solutions to problems with my network card!

best wishes

Jim