Greetings All! I have a somewhat mysterious hardward problem. On a tower box with external keyboard connected via a PS/2 connector, with external monitor,

A: During the BIOS phase of boot, if I enter the BIOS setup, I can use the keyboard to navigate round the BIOS menus, so the basic hardware handles keyboard input (and monitor output) fine.

B: However, if I boot into Linux, the usual slew of boot messages scrolls up the monitor screen, culminating in the "Login:" prompt (X is not started by default on this machine, and needs to be initiated by a logged-in user from the command-line prompt); but at this point the computer does not respond to keyboard input.

Nothing shows up on screen following key-presses. Even if I suppose that it might be an "output to monitor" problem, and try to log-in by typing the userid and password, nothing happens.

However, if I connect to the machine from another one over the network, I can log in fine.

If I then give the command

echo "Hello" > /dev/tty0

I see "Hello" output on the monitor.

So it doesn't look like a monitor problem, and therefore is most probably a failure to see the keyboard from Linux.

The Linux system is a SuSE 7.2 (from 2001). This problem is recent -- a few days ago it wasn't happening. Now it is.

Any suggestions? (It has nothing to do with X, of course). With thanks, Ted.

---------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@wlandres.net Date: 07-Jan-2012 Time: 16:13:58

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