Laptop Keyboard disabled on startup

[BBXiong]

Hi, i am using a BenQ s42 laptop. When i try to install kubuntu 8.10 last night, i found out that my keyboard have been disabled during kubuntu start up...
Can anyone please help me with that??

thank you

[mbitesd]

Any suggestions for this problem? I've tried both the desktop and alternate iso's but in both cases the keyboard doesn't work. Would a usb keyboard be a work around?

[mbitesd]

Ok perhaps some more information would help.

When I run the live cd a menu pops up giving me the option to "run ubuntu without changing the hard drive", "install ubuntu" etc, and I can use the keyboard to scroll around those menus and change things. However when I select the live cd option, ubuntu shows a loading screen for a while and then boots into a cli, not a gui as I expect it should. At the cli the keyboard doesn't do anything.

I thought the problem might actually be related to the DVD drive, so I tried the suggestions here https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+b...616/comments/8 to no avail.

So any ideas?

[mbitesd]

Ok I think I've made a little headway. This laptop has "hybrid graphics"- two video cards, a high performance NVidia 9600m and some intel video card for power saving.

Apparently laptops with hybrid graphics fail to boot to X (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/304445) unless the bus ID is specified.

My question is then: how can I specify which graphics card to use so that I can complete the installation successfully?

[lswest]

You should be able to disable one of the cards in your laptop's BIOS. You can probably reach this by hitting the delete key or F12 as it's starting up (there should be instructions on how to reach the BIOS or the Setup page in the first few moments of boot).

About the keyboard, you may need to, once you have graphics, go to the control panel, find the regional and language options, and then under keyboard layout and keyboard information, change it to be an "evdev-managed keyboard". At least, that's what I had to do on my laptop running ArchLinux with KDE 4.2 Beta.

[mbitesd]

Unfortunately there isn't a way to disable one of the graphics cards in the bios. I think then I will need some way to pass the bus ID information as a boot option.

[stephen53]

I built a desktop computer recently. Sometimes I notice the usb keyboard wouldn't be working when I booted up. I would unplugged my key then back in and it would work. I checked my bios menu and found that usb was ticked off. I ticked it to be on and the problem went away. Check your bios and see if the problem might be there.

[freaksterr6676]

My keyboard is working on intrepid perfectly. Simply add the following to your kernel boot parameters to fix the keyboard and trackpad:

i8042.nomux=1 i8042.noloop=1

Also the "|" isn't correctly mapped, you need to create a file ~/.xmodmap. In it, you need the following entry:
keycode 94 = backslash bar

[zombrax]

My keyboard is working on intrepid perfectly. Simply add the following to your kernel boot parameters to fix the keyboard and trackpad:

i8042.nomux=1 i8042.noloop=1

Also the "|" isn't correctly mapped, you need to create a file ~/.xmodmap. In it, you need the following entry:
keycode 94 = backslash bar

ok i have the same problem as everyone else with the S42 laptop.

As I'm a total newbie could someone please be kind enough to show me how
1) Get into kernal boot parameters
2) create a file (as in how and where)

many thanks
zX