[ale] keyboard works in bios/grub but not after boot?

[Joe Knapka]

"John Wells" <jb at sourceillustrated.com> writes:

> Guys,
> 
> Just rebooted my ubuntu box after doing a dist-upgrade last night, and now
> I no longer have keyboard functionality.  The keyboard works fine in the
> bios and in grub, but as soon as I select a kernel and boot it no longer
> responds. I first thought it might be related to the upgrade, so I dropped
> a live ubuntu cd in...same behavior...fine in grub and bios, screwed as
> soon as it loaded the kernel.
> 
> Otherwise the box operates fine...I can boot it up and ssh in.

I had a similar problem under Ubuntu. The problem was that the machine
had a USB keyboard, and I had AT keyboard emulation enabled in the
BIOS. Linux detected the AT keyboard at boot time, but something
during the kernel init process disabled the BIOS AT emulation (IIRC),
and the kernel was left with a nonexistent primary keyboard. When I
disabled the BIOS AT kbd emulation, Linux detected the USB device as
the primary keyboard, and all was well.

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka