Recently my Asus Eee PC 901's touchpad broke, but recently I have installed Linux Mint 12 and Xubuntu 11.10, and noticed that I have the issue unless I manually enter GRUB and select the kernel. It is the first on the list, so should be 0 in the grub settings, and so should boot automatically. When I have done this, however, it works perfectly. When not, the touchpad does not work, the keyboard seems to have Ctrl pressed in the TTYs (I try and enter my name and it prints ^B^E^N even though I typed ben. Is there a way to fix this? Or get GRUB to be forced to show? Also, would a new touchpad fix it?

Hi,
You haven't said which Grub you're using (Grub2 or legacy), and it would be helpful to have your grub.cfg or menu.lst file, but in the absence it sounds as though it all comes right when you introduce a bit of delay in the booting process.
I'd suggest that you check that in the boot options you have ro and root=/dev/whatever or root=UUID=whatever.

It is Grub2, and should I put either the grub.cfg or the grub config file in /etc/default?

No.
I meant just to open it, read-only, by double clicking, scrolling down to the first real menuentry, and looking to see if in the line staring linux there is ro root=UUID=whatever.

But it might be just as well to run This may fix the problem, whatever the exact cause.

I checked the file and there was nothing like It very well may be a hardware issue, but when I used to have Ubuntu 10.10 installed it had no issues, although it has not worked with Mint, OpenSUSE, Xubuntu and Ubuntu, so I will check if 10.10 works with it. Thanks for your help.

Well, that might be the problem.
I suggest you try, first,
then, when update-grub has finished its subtle magic,
This should produce one or more lines something like:
Your version no and UUID will be different of course
If for some reason there is still no ro in the boot options, you could try editing the file /etc/default/grub:
Find the line that says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=" . . . " and put ro in between the quotes, eg GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="ro quiet splash"
Save the file, and run update-grub as before. Then check again using grep, and then reboot.

Right, I did that, however the touchpad still refuses to work unless I go into grub. I was thinking it might make it work if I found a way to force GRUB to show. My desktop has this set up, so it always boots, but that is Grub Legacy, not Grub2. Any ideas?

To get the menu to show, it's back to editing /etc/default/grub as root.
Find the line that says "GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT= "and comment it out.
I'd also edit the timeout line to say something like "GRUB_TIMEOUT=10" Then run update-grub again.
If after that you still can't get the touchpad, then I'm out of ideas.
For grub information, see:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

Thanks!

I've been trying to restrain myself from saying "get rid of grub2 and go back to legacy" Can't hold it back any longer.

Thanks for the advice, but I sidestepped the issue and made GRUB always show by commenting out them lines.