[SOLVED] No keyboard input after typing username and password in xdm.

In xdm I can type my username (visible) and my password (not visible).
Then my Desktop manager sets my background, and panel, and then opens urxvt terminal (thats ok). When I type in the urxvt window nothing appears, nor does the curser move. If I type a simple command "ls -l" nothing appears. I have tried entering text in other applications, firefox (search box), libreoffice, gvim, and xterm, no text appears. If I choose to launch a console instead of the window manager, I can login and enter commands normally.

I am running Debian 9.1 on a Lenovo Ideapad, and it has been running for months. I have run "apt update" and "apt upgrade", as root and watched many upgrades since installing.

I removed xdm and installed lightdm, but that did nothing to fix the problem.

As neither your keyboard nor your mouse are working in X, the fault must lie in their driver xorg-xf86-evdev. Try reinstalling that.

Keyboard worked fine in xdm. Mouse still works fine in X, I can use it to open apps, and select icons, just cant type in the text boxes. Will reload the drivers.

It doesn't seem like an XDM problem as you seem to have discovered. The console which XDM often runs on startup is usually an xconsole(1) instance.

That doesn't explain your other issues. I assume mouse/touchpad input works, just keyboard input is dead?

Would be useful to know what window manager / desktop this is and how you've configured it to start?

The laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad 100, that I loaded Debian 9 onto with a Netinst iso on a usb flashdrive.
The Window manager is Openbox, and there is no Desktop environment, but I have installed Lxpanel. All from the Debian mirror. The Openbox menu has grown with Pipe-menus that I have written in Bash. This computer has been running fairly well for almost a year with the only problems being the wireless card drops connections, and my wife uses Adobe flash player, that I update directly from the Adobe website.

Yesterday I formatted the hdd, and reinstalled from a new release of the Netinst iso. I now need to test this install.

I chose to reinstall because I had only one response, and that did not help. Thank you for your reply, I will wait for more responses while I test the new install.

Originally Posted by Duglas Thank you for your reply, I will wait for more responses while I test the new install.

i would prefer if you tell us if the new install has fixed the problem!

The new Install did not fix the problem, but it did help me find it. My wife prefers the mouse to the touchpad, so I wrote a snippet of code to kill the touchpad if the mouse is present. The problem promptly appeared on the first reboot after I had restored a backup of the ~.xsession file. Xinput provides a variable and an "if statement" is supposed to kill the touchpad, if the mouse is present, instead it killed the keyboard, because "xinput" changed the id of the mouse when it was plugged into a different port. Checking the mouse id and editing the code fixed the problem. This thread is now solved, thank you all.