henrylaw
March 31st, 2014, 12:38 PM
I found several threads on this subject, scattered around t'Interweb, but they were all quite old and I couldn't append to them; hence this post, initated in "solved" status, to help anyone else who comes across the problem.
Installed 12.04 desktop on an elderly Dell Dimension 2400. Install went fine but when lightdm came up after re-booting the keyboard and mouse were both inoperative: all I could do was hard power off and start again. Pressing Ctrl/Alt/F1 as soon as the "ubuntu" splash screen comes up gets you a character-mode tty login; as I was logging in there were numerous messages "serial8250: too much work for irq17". Keyboard worked perfectly in tty mode, of course, as it had during the installation.
Other posts led me to the solution: disable the serial port in the BIOS. Oddly there are still a few "too much work" messages, but keyboard and mouse now work on the lightdm login screen.
Edit later, just before marking "solved". I spoke too soon; disabling the serial port still gave me the problem at times. The real answer was to take out the modem card that was in there. Remember modems? Neep neep neep swisssssh ...
Installed 12.04 desktop on an elderly Dell Dimension 2400. Install went fine but when lightdm came up after re-booting the keyboard and mouse were both inoperative: all I could do was hard power off and start again. Pressing Ctrl/Alt/F1 as soon as the "ubuntu" splash screen comes up gets you a character-mode tty login; as I was logging in there were numerous messages "serial8250: too much work for irq17". Keyboard worked perfectly in tty mode, of course, as it had during the installation.
Other posts led me to the solution: disable the serial port in the BIOS. Oddly there are still a few "too much work" messages, but keyboard and mouse now work on the lightdm login screen.
Edit later, just before marking "solved". I spoke too soon; disabling the serial port still gave me the problem at times. The real answer was to take out the modem card that was in there. Remember modems? Neep neep neep swisssssh ...