Mouse/keypad stopped working

B-Con · 2008-02-12 08:14:12

I rebooted my laptop just this afternoon to discover that my mouse and keyboard no longer work in Arch. From the moment gdm comes up, the mouse and keyboard are frozen.

I removed gdm from my daemons array and on reboot I noted that the bootup got stuck for something like 2 minutes at "Starting Hardware Abstraction Layer". Once it finally gets done starting HAL I'm greeted by a login prompt and my keyboard doesn't work.

What's up with HAL, what can I do to troubleshoot it? Sound like it's what's to blame for my keyboard/mouse issues?

abstracity · 2008-02-12 10:38:58

Have you upgraded any packages lately that you think could have caused this? If you can, try to think if you directly caused this through modification of some essential part of your system. Also, since this is a serious issue, you might want to try booting into the Install CD, seeing if the live environment detects keyboard input, and try to figure out what it is doing differently.

B-Con · 2008-02-12 21:26:14

Oh, whoops, I edited that part of my post out. I did a pacman -Syu for the first time in about two days, so I upgraded about 6 or 7 packages, including the kernel. I scanned the package list and don't recall seeing any packages that I would think would be related to this.

abstracity · 2008-02-12 21:36:06

If all you did was a "pacman -Syu" I would suggest filing a bug report.

B-Con · 2008-02-12 21:52:24

(The mouse/keyboard work fine in other OSs, btw.)

A bug report for what? HAL? I'd like to be able to provide some sort of error or dump rather than "mouse doesn't work anymore".

abstracity · 2008-02-12 21:56:38

Well, have you tried removing HAL from your DAEMONS array in /etc/rc.conf? Maybe a module that is needed for your keyboard to work is no longer being loaded because it changed or is not being auto-detected by udev anymore.

B-Con · 2008-02-14 00:51:55

Hm, that works. I seem to have somehow mentally switched the jobs of udev and hal, if I had them straight I would've instantly tried disabling hal, I just figured that if hal wasn't loading the keyboard modules (actually udev's job, but I got them mixed up) then how could the modules load without hal? (Answer: Because udev loads the modules, hal doesn't.)

The problem is definitely with hal. I booted in without hal and everything works fine. However, if I try to manually start hal from /etc/rc.d/hal then it takes about two minutes, fails, and then my mouse and keyboard go back to not working. Interestingly, unlike before my power button now works.

Any debug work I can do to a) fix this, b) file a meaningful bug report?

Arch Linux

#1 2008-02-12 08:14:12

Mouse/keypad stopped working

#2 2008-02-12 10:38:58

Re: Mouse/keypad stopped working

#3 2008-02-12 21:26:14

Re: Mouse/keypad stopped working

#4 2008-02-12 21:36:06

Re: Mouse/keypad stopped working

#5 2008-02-12 21:52:24

Re: Mouse/keypad stopped working

#6 2008-02-12 21:56:38

Re: Mouse/keypad stopped working

#7 2008-02-14 00:51:55

Re: Mouse/keypad stopped working

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