Today I noticed that the keyboard doesn't work anymore for typing the password at the Fedora 15 login screen. It worked perfectly yesterday. Tried replacing the USB keyboard with a PS/2 one, but the results are the same, no response. The keyboard works fine hopping around in the BIOS for example, but when it comes to logging in, nothing. Can only use the mouse. Anyone experienced this before? Must be a software issue since the keyboard works before this stage. Should I try some safe mode booting, and are there specifics I should check for then in Fedoras drivers / settings?

Strange happenings on a saturday.. =/

Testing with the second keyboard was a good step.

I don't have an answer, but I have a couple of ideas for testing:

1. If you can, try testing the keyboards with another computer, just to verify that they work (it seems almost impossible that both would fail at the same time, but "almost" is not "completely").

2. Try ssh'ing into the box and seeing if it recognizes the input from the remote computer. If it does, try

I have a PS-2 keyboard on a KVM switch and that string returned

3. Try booting to a live CD of something and seeing whether the keyboard works with it. If it does, it positively narrows the problem to your software install.

I would really be curious to know what you find out.

Thanks for the tiplist. Tried the grep thingy, the result is listed below:

[root@server ~]# dmesg | grep keyboard
[ 1.293296] input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /devices/platform/i8042/serio0/input/input2

BUT - Tonight I tried typing some more on the keyboard, and it works! But it looks like "slow keys" or something is turned on when typing the password, you have to hold the keys for a while before a dot appears at the password box. Nice! Alas - it now fails to load session "Gnome" for some strange reason.
Ok, I'll try the KDE Plasma Workspace instead i thought, which I haven't tried out before, and it worked just fine, keyboard totally normal once logged into it.

Made sure to enable the sshd.service as soon as I was in, so I could remotely access it via PuTTy or similiar software from my other pcs.

Is there a keyboard shortcut to enable/disable slow keys while at the login screen?

How do I fix up the gnome that now fails to load ?

Appreciate help, as always. You are the best, guys! =)

If you've added virtual terminals to /etc/inittab, it can cause the keyboard to not work sometimes if you're using gdm/kdm/xdm or whatever. You'd know if you have, though, 'cause you would have had to edit it manually.

If that's the case, then you can either skip the terminal your display manager uses, or change it in your display manager's configuration.

Thanks for the update. I never heard of "slow keys" before.

I gather it's a accessibility feature of some sort:

http://amandakerik.wordpress.com/200...eys-in-ubuntu/

I'll try to fish around some more and see if I find some accessibility option to remove.
But to fix the non-loading gnome session, are there any session files that should be deleted (that have become corrupted), or do I have to reinstall gnome? No, haven't edited the file mentioned in the latest replies.

But so strange that the keys are slow at the login prompt, and not after logging into KDE..

Can try booting in safemode as well, to see if the problem still persists.

I cured my system tonight, after some googling around. A suggestion was to check out the file .xsession-errors lurking in the home folder. It was thousands of lines long, and didn't really provide much helpful information. Ran across another site after searching for "failed to load session gnome", that suggested a group update. So I did - yum groupupdate "GNOME Desktop Environment", and presto, it installed a bunch of stuff, and then Gnome loaded up like a charm.

I also got rid of the keyboard problem, just by holding down shift for 10+ seconds when you are supposed to enter your login password at the login screen, and a popup box asked if I wanted to deactivate slow keys. (Should really have thought about those slow keys earlier, especially when my soon 2 year-old daughter keeps tinkering with the keyboard all the time...)

So - Happy camper, now marking the thread as SOLVED! YES! Have a nice evening all! ))

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