Starling[star1] Mouse/tack pad broken

[black_ice=cream]

AHH!!! Okay, let's not forget about me!!!!! Okay, I can't do anything because when I turn the comp. on it just boots up, but the mouse doesn't work!?!?!?!

[cposs]

I had this same problem and also had to drop in to recovery mode to fix it. black_ice=cream, try this:

1. Plug the computer in to a network connection. It's easier to just have wired networking come up than try to get wireless working from the command line.

2. Reboot your computer and enter recovery mode as thomasaaron directed in one of his earlier posts (hit shift when you see "grub" come up on your screen after the bios screen goes away). Once you are booted into recovery mode (the screen should be mostly blue) go to the "console as root with network" or something like that, and the screen will go black with white command line text.

3. First enter this to get rid of the package that (probably) didn't install correctly:

apt-get remove winbind

4. Enter

apt-get install hal winbind

to reinstall hal, and put winbind back. This time, unlike the automated upgrade, you should be asked if you want to keep your current version of a config file or switch to a new one. Unless you've made changes to the file yourself, say "y" to switch to the new one.

5. Reboot, and you should be ok. If you can't get the winbind to remove, you might have to run a "dpkg --configure -a"; I forget exactly what I had to do.

There's probably a way around removing and then reinstalling winbind, but that's what worked for me. Good luck.

[black_ice=cream]

when I press shift when grub is loading, nothing happens...

[jsimmond]

when I press shift when grub is loading, nothing happens...

I had to press Esc to get the Grub menu on my starling, maybe it's the same on yours.

[black_ice=cream]

yeah Mines Esc 2 I figured out. But I did the instructions and didn't work... I'm going to go try it again. Okay it still didn't work. I booted into safe mode and did the 'drop in root shell prompt' (or something like that) and typed: apt-get remove winbind and then apt-get install hal winbind and then I typed reboot and the mouse still doesn't work and I still get the message of: HAL is not running. What now?!

[cposs]

Oh, yeah, I forgot on grub v1 it's ESC and on grub v2 it's shift to go to the list.

I made a mistake in my earlier instructions, too. Sorry about that. You need to run:

apt-get install hal --reinstall

If you don't tell it to reinstall it just assumes that the installed files are OK, and does nothing. Since you're trying to fix a corrupted or missing file you need it to do the reinstall.

You might need to have a network connection so it can download the hal package if you don't have the deb on your hard drive.

[black_ice=cream]

YES THANK YOU THAT FIXED IT!! Thank you so much man!! :] I really appriciate the help, as I am a complete nooby! It was weird though... I tried it first wirelessly, and it didn't work and when I tried it with a wired connection, it worked!!!

[MarkID]

I finally upgraded my Starling to 9.10 and had the problem with the broken touchpad. I tried the procedure described here (reinstalling hal) and it seemed to work. But the next day when I turned my Starling on, the touchpad was broken again. I tried both "drop in root" and "drop in root with networking," and I had a wired connection. I'm leaving this weekend and I need my Straling to work.

[thomasaaron]

MarkID,

Please boot into netroot and run...

sudo apt-get install grub-pc

Did that fix it?

[MarkID]

Thank you, Thomas. It appears to have solved the problem. Ubuntu is great. S76 is better.

MarkID,

Please boot into netroot and run...

sudo apt-get install grub-pc

Did that fix it?