Hi I have been running debian unstable for a while now - and not had any problems - currently was running a custom 2.4.16 with ext3 patch. I have had a USB mouse for quite a while - and so had the USB support for mice installed in my kernel. Recently however my PS/2 keyboard port died a relatively sudden death. Replacement of my motherboard under waranty was going to be 2 weeks so I decided that instead I would just invest in a USB keyboard. I dual boot with win2k - which works fine with my new keyboard - I enabled BIOS support for USB keyboards - so that I was able to operate my lilo and winnt boot loader successfully. However - booting into debian resulted in no keyboard activity. A bit of research led me to believe that this was probably because I had not enabled USB Keyboard support - and the normal USB support was disabling my BIOS support. Hoped that there was some boot parameter i could give lilo to disable USB - but there wasnt. So I pulled out the trusty rescue disk. Rescue disk doesnt have USB support - so I thought that I would be good to go ... and compile myself a new kernel with the proper support. However the only progress I made from this was discovering that my keyboard was being disabled a bit earlier than I had thought.
I am getting Keyboard - Timeout - No AT keyboard present? (hmmm thats from memory - but close) it repeats twice before continuing onwards - the keyboard is non-functional from that point onwards (as demonstrated by caps/num/scroll-lock not operating the lights any more) Rebooting back into my custom kernel - I notice that indeed the same error messages are being displayed - to the same effect. (although theres a set of 2 characters in brackets after each line - different for each of the error lines. Any advice, redirection to a better place to ask even :), would be great. Gareth Pearce - nano sized contributor to open source.
