I have a Toshiba Sattelite A100-110 laptop (a few years old)

First, i wanted to try out the new Ubuntu 9.10 so i burned it and booted it up. Then i found out that my built in keyboard is not working, ok so i plugged in an external usb keyboard, that seemed to work.. Then i played around with the live cd for a couple of minutes and my mouse stopped working, tried using the trackpad instead, it worked.. Then after a while keyboard stopped working and trackpad as well..

OK now i was totally freaked out.. Tried installing Mandriva 2010 - SAME THING, Fedora 12 - SAME THING.. OK, well i tought weather my laptop is broken or the new kernel is broken.. Installed Ubuntu 8.10 LTS - WORKED PERFECTLY FINE. Hmm.. Then i installed Ubuntu 9.04 - worked fine as well. Windows also works fine.. But none of the new versions of distros work.. Well all i can think of right now is that it might be the new 2.6.31 kernel's fault.. What do you guys think? And what would be the solution for it? Downgrading the kernel? (not even sure how to do that..)

Thanks for listening to me

Isn't Slackware available with the 2.4 kernel, if I remember correctly? I know that's still used in distros for older computers, like Damn Small Linux.

Not since Slackware 11.0.

Maybe its the kernel; maybe its xorg. Those are the only two likely things I can think of, and there have been big changes in both recently.

Is there a big problem (a real problem...I'm sure that you won't like this suggestion, but, compared to the alternatives) using an older version, for a while?

BTW, does this problem also occur with Live CDs? If you get the same problem with the live version, at least you don't have to install to test out new releases.

Yep, also happens with live CDs.

But guess what, I installed A new distro but with an old kernel (2.6.28 instead of 2.6.31) And it works!