No keyboard and trackpad ACER 5553g laptop

[GregTaylor]

I recently purchased an ACER aspire 5553g laptop.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on it and had a few setup problems that I'm trying to solve.

The first problem I tried to solve was that it wouldn't detect the battery. To solve this I performed a bios update and it worked, now I can detect the battery and monitor it.

HOWEVER, I have lost the use of the keyboard and trackpad (quite a bit more annoying)

I have tried to boot using a live CD (ubuntu & openSUSE) and still no keyboard or trackpad.


Can someone help me ???

Greg

[Fafler]

Try tinkering around in the BIOS setup. There might be an option for USB legacy support or something.

[GregTaylor]

Alas, there's not much to tinker with in this bios (no usb options). I tried all the settings but no luck.

[amaranthius]

I'm facing the exact same problem. After flashing the BIOS i got the "Disabling IRQ18" message during startup and the keyboard was gone. After some googling and digging in forums I tried passing various options to grub like 'noirqdebug' and 'irqpoll' but with no luck. I also tried running the latest Arch live cd, but with the same result.

If anybody finds a solution/workaround, please share it.

[amaranthius]

After many hours of banging my head against a concrete wall I've found a workaround. It's far from the best, but at least I can use my system again:

passed

acpi=off

to grub and it worked but fglrx complained

ACPI is disabled on this system

and failed to load KDE. To get around this I did

modeprobe radeon

and edited the line

Driver  "fglrx"

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to

Driver  "radeon"

startx then worked like a charm. I still haven't tried making this the default startup behavior, but it shouldn't be hard.

Hope this helps!

P.S. I still think a bug should be reported because this problem is quite annoying.

P.P.S. Oh, and of course, forget about battery detection

[amaranthius]

SOLVED: Updating the BIOS to v1.17 fixed the keyboard problem.

[GregTaylor]

Wow,

A big thank you for the workaround.

I'll try the bios update. I'm glad they got around to a new bios, when I contacted acer they wanted me to send in the laptop.

I've been running ubuntu in virtual box since then.

[GregTaylor]

The bios update works for me too!

Now on to minor problems.

Solved

[amaranthius]

Hey, no problem! Glad to hear everything's OK.
Heh, when I contacted acer i didn't receive any response at all One day I just decided to check if, by any chance, there's a new BIOS and what do you know!

[daanemanz]

Wow... thanks!

I've been struggling with this since I bought my laptop 3 months ago. I thought I'd be stuck with Windows 7 forever