I have debian with kde on a laptop with a built in ps/2 keyboard and touch pad mouse which have been working without problem since i bought the computer. However, recently i booted the computer up and all of a sudden the mouse and keyboard are not functioning. I know it is not a hardware problem because i can type in the BIOS password, make the selection between normal and recovery mode in grub, and can type in all of my passwords to unencrypt my hard drive. Also, it recognizes the keyboard all the way up until the point where kde starts, at which point it loads a login screen with the mouse and cursor on the screen, but no ability to type, not even caps lock or ctrl+alt+f1 to switch to console mode. does anyone know why this is? I have performed not updates and have not changed the configuration of my computer so i am not sure why this would happen. Thank You!

P.S. 1 out 15 times when i load the part where i need to type in the passwords to unencrypt the hard drive the keyboard will stop working then instaed of with kde.

Perhaps it is a problem not with KDE but with X. X after all looks after the keyboard and mouse. Reinstall it??

alright but xorg came preinstalled through the apt packages resource...is there some way to uninstall and reinstall all the packages that are installed for xorg

Is there is some sort of difficulty typing anything in?? Try single user mode, no idea if that's sensible.

alright i reinstalled xorg using the command you just gave me, still no mouse or keyboard...On a side note, i recently installed the package libgtkextra-xorg-2.0-0 (i think that was the name) before the reboot that stopped the mouse and keyboard...I uninstalled that and did your xorg reinstall but still no changes...what else could be the problem?

I'm buggered if I know frankly. You know, all I can say is if it were me I'd perhaps consider that X is not configured correctly.

So, if you think it's a good idea, to get rid of some configuration, and then reinstall it. Or perhaps 'dpkg-reconfigure'.

So, if you could reinstall it, it follows that the keyboard works in some circumstances?

Same problem here. Carried out an update of Squeeze, and keyboard and mouse stopped functioning. I noticed eventually that the following two packages were missing:

xserver-xorg-input-kbd and
xserver-xorg-input-mouse

An apt-get install of these two packages fixed the problem (For me anyway).

Hope that this helps

Leo

alright thanks to both of you- anyway i accidentally did a force power off while dev was populating the encrypted disks destroying my aes keys so i had to do a fresh reinstall anyway- thanks for both ofo your help and if the problem arises at a later time i will refer back to this.