I am a to Linux and a friend of mine recommended installing gentoo on my laptop. All went well with the installation and everything, but when I rebooted the system, they keyboard doesn't work at all.

The keymaps and everything loaded up just fine, and if I am hitting keys while the system is loading, then the keyboard does work, but this gets annoying.

I am running an xfs fine system using the kernel-2.4.20-xfs-r3 for my kernel which is the same as gentoo's liveCD. When using the liveCD, the keyboard was found and activated without a hitch, but it won't do it when normal booting.

Any help in the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You

something like this happend with some kernels
this have been solved by disabling pcmcia mce etc

I havn't installed the PCMCIA drivers yet, so theye was nothing to diable.