I am using Ubuntu 8.04 on a dell inspiron e1505 laptop. This is my first foray back into Linux for several years. I love this OS, it installed perfectly and everything has worked perfectly with no hassle.

However, it has a very annoying keyboard problem. I have searched this problem extensively (both on this site and on google) and I have found no solutions to this somewhat common problem.

Every few uses, they keyboard will randomly stop working. Everything appears normal, the mouse works but won't click anything outside of the top windows. The "fix" is to log out (ctrl+alt+backspace) and log back in. The keyboard works for the log in, and after that.


Has anyone found a solution to this problem? I would really hate to switch to another distro just because of this issue when the rest of the OS works so perfectly.

random shutdowns of weird things are often due to acpid interacting with bios and board HW in unexpected ways.
setting acpi=off on the grub kernel line will stop this if so.

If you verify this, you may have some luck experimenting with the bios settings. It is not unusual to switch off all the power management which the bios handles as the kernel is pretty good at it these days. Result depend on mobo and bios.

Failing that, the alternative is to rebind the keyboard in an init script. eg:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...899/comments/6