No keyboard or mouse in X?

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 2:33 pm Post subject: No keyboard or mouse in X?

Alright I just loaded an HP dv5-1150us laptop with Gentoo 64bit. All went VERY smoothly, until I finished emerging everything and rebooted. X started and KDM starts. At this point I have NO keyboard or touchpad. I cannot do anything. The power button won't even shut it down. What do I do and why is this happening? I pulled the battery and rebooted it and chose recovery mode, but it started X anyway and I am STILL locked out. The system is not locked up because after several minutes the screen blanks as it should. How do I get into the laptop?
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xaviermiller · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 2:42 pm Post subject:

Please give the output of "emerge --info". Did you specified "evdev" in xorg ?
What is the content of the Xorg log ?

For the shutdown button, it's managed by the acpid service. Start it and you will be able to shut down.
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The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 2:44 pm Post subject:

How do I get to a VT to do this? It is LITERALLY like the keyboard is disconnected. CTRL+ALT+F<x> does nothing. I cannot get to a prompt.

*UPDATE*

I plugged in a USB mouse to see if that would work and it did not. It's like X is ignoring all input.
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Ever picture systemd as what runs "The Borg"?

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 3:19 pm Post subject:

You don't. If you have SSH enabled, you can SSH into the box and stop the XDM service. Otherwise, you'll have to boot an install CD, chroot into your install, and remove XDM from the default runlevel.

The important variable of /etc/portage/make.conf is INPUT_DEVICES. Please post what you have there. (Of course, Xavier's ask would include this information.)

- John
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Roman_Gruber · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 3:44 pm Post subject:

You may use sysrescuecd, chroot there and figure out what happening.

Personal note, I never ever autostart xdm, gdm or such. Why?
When the x-server is broken you are sometimes unable to do anything.

you may check your make.conf

you should hve at least something like this defined in your make.conf

INPUT_DEVICES="evdev synaptics keyboard mouse wacom joystick"

and something like this

VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia"
ALSA_CARDS="hda-intel"

You may check the gentoo-wiki and the gentoo handbook for the related configuration issues.

you may check whats started at boot
rc-update show

and remove xdm, and add acpid.

than you may generate needed config files in folder /etc

gentoo wiki and gentoo handbook are your friends, chroot from a livecd and go on configuring your box.

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:16 pm Post subject:

OK, I did not even think about SSH. I have a lot on my plate today and my brain isn't as good as it was when I was younger. I will SSH in and stop XDM. I will also post the input devices. I did not specify the input devices, so it should be at default.
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Ever picture systemd as what runs "The Borg"?

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:28 pm Post subject:

I don't think there is a default, so that's your likely culprit. Most people can get by with just

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:39 pm Post subject:

My "INPUT_DEVICES" contains "keyboard mouse evdev". I can add synaptiks, but I have not had to do that on any of my other laptops (including this Dell Latitude). Notagainst it, just find it odd.

So I should go into /etc/portage/make.conf and add "INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse evdev synaptiks"?
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Ever picture systemd as what runs "The Borg"?

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3433

skip that mouse and keyboard, evdev replaces them both

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:57 pm Post subject:

Alright. I also noticed that this system is throwing an error I have never seen before. It says udev needs dev-mount. Things scroll so fast I cannot read it all, but this does not happen on any other Gentoo system and they're all about the same. I also see errors about udev and some temporary files.

*EDIT*

The error is about /run/tmpfiles.d/kmod.conf. It contains things like "c! /dev/cuse 0600 - - - 10:203". What in the world is this for?

*UPDATE*

According to my research, this is for systemd. I do not have a single systemd package on my system. Why is this being created at every boot and throwing errors? How do I get this crap off my system? I do not want ANYTHING related to systemd, I use KDE, and it seems more and more systemd crap is causing issues on non-systemd systems. My first big issue was a network error that I solved by deleting /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.ModemManager-1 or something similar. I deleted /run/tmpfiles.d but it keeps coming back on boot and throwing errors. I cannot locate a single systemd package on my system. Perhaps this is thew cause of my other issues?

*UPDATE*

Alright, I found out I had to remove tmpfiles.dev from sysinit and tmpfiles.setup from boot. Why were these installed? What brought them in? They're not on existing systems which are setup in the exact same way.

Also, I have a broken symlink in sysinit. Something added udev-mount to sysinit, but /etc/init.d/udev-mount does not exist. Why is all of this stuff being added to new installs? It's broken.

*UPDATE*

I believe I see my issue. If I try to start udev, it fails to start due to non-existent service dev-mount. What the heck? I do have udev-mount on my other systems. What happened? This one emerged stuff the same as every other system (same script), so where is udev-mount?
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Ever picture systemd as what runs "The Borg"?

khayyam · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:01 pm Post subject:

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:18 pm Post subject:

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 11:02 pm Post subject:

Something was very broken on that system. I have zeroed the disk and will start from scratch tomorrow. It actually had issues when installing and all kinds fo crap was missing, I couldn't update or rebuild the preserved things, so it was all a big mess.

I had udev on that system, but on my work laptop it forced me to use eudev when installing KDE a few months back, so eudev is on it. I thought we had to switch to eudev at some point due to udev tying into systemd?
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Ever picture systemd as what runs "The Borg"?

khayyam · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 11:12 pm Post subject:

John R. Graham · Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 12:23 am Post subject:

khayyam · Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 1:29 am Post subject:

grosgood · n00b Joined: 01 Feb 2015 Posts: 22 Location: Brooklyn, NY

This bit me - no keyboard, no mouse, on the local X-Window display after a world update on Jan 29. I was able to SSH into the affected box. This is an OpenRC installation v. 0.12.4, udev v. 126, udev-init-scripts v. 127 amd64 architecture. Slim is the session manager. The box has a simple partition layout, with /var and /usr in the same partition, and doesn't presently use an initrd image.

I eventually learned that udev-init-scripts-27 (Stabilized since Jan 19) no longer installs /etc/init.d/udev-mount as had v. 26 and previous. udev failed on boot, reporting it needed the dev-mount service (provided by the late udev-mount script), and the X.org.log reports in an informational message that it relies on udev to get the list of available input devices. So. No udev, no input device list. No list, X Windows starts, but doesn't know about the keyboard and mouse. Symptoms explained.

The immediate (kludge) workaround was to copy the "missing" udev-mount init script from another Gentoo installation (SysrescueCD, as it happens, still on udev-init-scripts-26) and reboot. udev came up without a problem, X-Windows got its device list and saw the keyboard and mouse and the world was merry and bright again.

But this *is* a kludge. It is pretty clear that udev-init-scripts-27 went through the stabilization and vetting by a number of Gentoo developers who I respect, so I assume the departure of the udev-mount init script from udev-init-scripts-27 has been sanity-checked and blessed and is a part of a larger game plan. I've a feeling there is a big udev memo somewhere that I haven't read telling me what that game plan is. I frequently miss memos

I should note that the Jan 29 world update was interrupted by a momentary power failure; that was the reason for the bootup and the initial discovery of this condition. One of the items due for installation is OpenRC-0.13.8, which I am now taking on board, so the system was not in an entirely consistent state. Fingers crossed.

I've been using Gentoo on my main boxes for a few years now, and never had reason to post here. Almost invariably, when I run into issues (which is not often) someone here as already Seen It and Done That, and if they haven't posted a solution here, there is enough background to point me in the right direction. For my inaugural post, I'd like to thank everybody that has posted here, and above all, the Gentoo development team for maintaining a really nice Linux environment.
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