Debian installation does not see the PS/2 keyboard?
 

Hi all,
this is my first post here, so I'll start off with a real quick situation report:
* Me: I'm an IT professional using Windows, so I do know my way around hardware, pc guts and Windows software. I have seen the light :D and want to run Linux. But which one? And just how? On *nix, I'm a total newbie. (My roots are in Macintosh, so I'm sort of an OS agnostic. :rolleyes: )
* Linux: As far as I can tell from reviews, I should probably go for Debian because it has a good installer (apt) or Mandrake because it's great at self-configuring. Also, I have a RedHat 9 lying around at home.
* System layout: My pc acts as the internet gateway (and DHCP server) for my home network, so it needs to be in an up-and-running state whenever I leave it (so the family can surf ;) ). It's got a 10mbit eth PCI towards the DSL and a 4-port 10/100mbit eth PCI towards my home network. My WinXP installation handles ICS, and while I hope to do the same on Linux, my first priority is to make it work for *me alone* before I look into the ICS stuff.
* Experience: I've installed RedHat and fiddled about for some hours. I like KDE better than Gnome. I have no idea why my print jobs dissapear, where to get a driver for my sound card, or how to access *any* local drives --- but these are all problems for a later post.

* THE PROBLEM: When I try to install Debian (from CD), it gets to the inital boot prompt (you know, "Press F1-F8 for various installation options"). So far so good, but when I continue I get to the Debian welcome-to-the-installation screen with an okay button --- and my keyboard doesn't work! Obviously, I can't continue from there --- the only way ahead seems to be a hard power off. (>_<)

I saw two lines of "AT keyboard not detected" (or something to that effect) during load, but it doesn't make sense since I *know* it works --- after all, the BIOS, DOS&Windows, and RedHat are all happy with it. The rest of my hardware is detected just fine (though RedHat correctly detects my onboard audio but won't activate it).

* More hardware: My keyboard is a Logitech Cordless iTouch (one of the first no-fuss PS/2-connected versions), but I see the same problem with a plain vanilla "wired" keyboard.
My mouse is a Microsoft Intellimouse 3.0 (optical, wired, USB), but I wouldn't think that is relevant in this regard.
My motherboard is an Asus A7A266-E with the newest BIOS ("1012"), sporting an AMD 1400 Thunderbird with 256Mb PC133 SDRAM on the side.
The primary IDE has an 80gig WinXP disk and a secondary 20gig "Linux playground" disk, the secondary IDE has an LS120 floppy drive and an unnamed CD-ROM slave drive.

:scratch: Help! How the devil can I make Debian see my keyboard (or just *any* keyboard, for that matter)?


So ... everybody: Thank you very much for listening to my woes, and I do hope that you can help me. If there's one thing I know, it's that Linux users are a forthcoming lot. Let's hope it's true! ;-)


Extra points awarded for:
-- Actually reading this far --- thanks again!
-- Should I go with Debian or Mandrake?
-- Is there a way to have one (or two!) user accounts, but not require a password? Double points if you can get us to log on without typing our usernames!
-- Is there a one-key equivalent to the "Windows" keyboard shortcut to bring up the "not-the-Start-but-you-know-what-I-mean" menu, or is there a way to set that up? (Half credit for a solution for "Ctrl+Esc".)
-- Is there a pinball game for Linux? My wife would be, um, more forgiving if she didn't have to wait for the reboot into Windows to play her Space Cadet Table.

I want to install Debian on my Acer Aspire 1600 notebook but i also got the keyboard problem :(

No keyboard - that's really weird! Where did you get your Debian CD from, and what version does it claim to install?

If you want pinball it looks like packages are only built for 'unstable' or 'testing' . Then 'apt-get pinball' should give you what you want. There is also xboing (apt-get xboing).

If you have bandwidth you can download the latest live Knoppix CD, which gives a quick and dirty way of getting a Debian 'testing' installation with all the latest goodies (well most anyway).

Gah, I forgot to post the version ... I knew there was something!

It's a Debian v30.r1 for i386., and I got them straight off the Debian FTP. Since then, I've discovered LinuxISO.org (and will get Mandrake from there in a few days), but then, that was all I knew. I'll try Knoppix also.

I've also been in touch with a person who posted in a newsgroup two years ago about the same problem. What caught my attention was that he had the same motherboard as I do.
He suggested I should try to recompile the thing with the 2.4 kernel, but I feel that's rather too complicated for me at this point. He did say, however, that he got it to work on another motherboard (A7V333 instead of A7A266). What version of Debian he was using, I'm not sure.

But, give me a few days to try out Knoppix and Mandrake, and I'll get back to you.

Thanks!

MD5 doesn't match
 

Hey wait a minute!

I just tried Luke Pascoe's "MD5 Summer" to compare the CD #1 with the "md5sum.txt" file on that very cd.

When the check starts up, I get a warning saying "The checksum file you have selected contains one or more ASCII generated sums. Ignore and continue?" This also happens when I run the program in binary mode, using the "-b" parameter.

I got about 1700 errors! I'll check this in RedHat also (if I can figure out how to), but I felt you guys should know about this --- I just may have bad installation media.

These are the actual failed checksums I get:
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.44\safe\driver-1.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.44\safe\driver-2.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.44\safe\driver-3.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.44\safe\driver-4.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.20\safe\driver-1.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.20\safe\driver-2.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.20\safe\driver-3.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.20\safe\driver-4.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\3.0.23-2002-05-21\images-1.20\safe\driver-5.bin ERROR: Checksum did not match.
... and also a bunch of 'em with HTML files in the /doc/ structure; but that shouldn't be relevant to the issue at hand.
Then I get 1700 of these:
.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\current\lang\tr\readme.txt ERROR: G:\.\dists\woody\main\disks-i386\current\lang\tr\readme.txt does not exist.

[EDIT] :scratch: Errr? MD5 cheking in RedHat ... I've read about the md5 shell command, but that only seems to work on ISO files --- how do you make an MD5 test of an actual cd? I don't have the ISO files on this pc, so I would like to verify the actual cd.
I can't find anything related in the forum, but perhaps I'm just missing it.

--
Klay

If you want to check against an existing list of md5sums it looks like

md5sum -c listofmd5sums

will do it. See the man page for md5sum for full details. If you just want a list md5sums for all files in a given directory tree, you can cd to the top directory and run

% find . -type f -exec md5sum {} \;

and pipe the result into a file if you want to keep it.

P.S. You mean a checksum for the iso, but from the CD. Not sure but 'cat /dev/hdc | md5sum' might do it (assuming that's where your CD is).

:study: Sorry, I've read the manpage for md5sum, but it's all greek to me. Well, not all of it, but at any rate I can't figure out how to make an md5 check against the media in "/mnt/cdrom/".

I think I'll just drop this and give Mandrake a try in a few days.

I can save the md5sum for 'somefile' in a file with

% md5sum somefile > md5sum.txt

So md5sum.txt looks like:

% cat md5sum.txt
f51e12efa18bb828cf57d9d4a81b2fb1 somefile

Later on I can check if 'somefile' has changed:

% md5sum -c md5sum.txt

No output here means the checksum agrees with what is in the file. But if 'somefile' has changed I get:

% md5sum -c md5sum.txt
md5sum: MD5 check failed for 'somefile'

This works also if with a list of lots of files and their checksums.

For a checksum on the whole CD the file /etc/fstab should show you where the CD is mounted (Usually /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd). I just tried this on a random CD - takes 2-3mins @2.4GHz:

% cat /dev/hdc | md5sum
cat: /dev/hdc: Input/output error
fc7b8d90bc7cdc7d8d71ba94e0014287 -

'cat' gets an error when it hits the end of the device file, but hopefully by then all the data has been processed by md5sum. I'm not even sure this is the same as the checksum on the ISO, but that's my guess. I don't have a CD around where I know the ISO checksum.

I checked the Debian site again -- there are other md5 files there, next to the ISOs. When I compate them to the ISO files I used to burn the disks with, I get an OK. So either the MD5 files on the cd's are off, or my burnt images are off.

I've now burnt and verified Knoppix v3.3 and Mandrake v9.1. I will try these later today.

Cheers,
Klay

Just to let you know ... I have three computers, and none of them succeeded in starting the Debian installation, even though my CD's check out fine (with MD5).

So I've installed Mandrake on my main computer instead, and perhaps one day, I'll venture into Debian again.

<end of thread> as far as I'm concerned. Maroonbaboon, thanks for your help, even though it didn't work out.