Laptop keyboard stopped working after upgrade to Lubuntu 13.10...fixed

I have a fairly old LG laptop (circa 2007) that I have been running Lubuntu on. It is a lighter-weight version of Ubuntu, that uses the LXDE desktop rather than Gnome. Performance is reasonable with it. Anyway, since this is sort of the guinea-pig of all my systems, I thought I'd upgrade it to the latest version of Lubuntu (my other systems are still on the 12.04 LTS releases).

The upgrade went pretty smoothly, it has to be said. It was only when I got to the login screen and tried to type my password that things went wrong - I couldn't type anything. None of the keys worked, not even Control or F1, so I could switch to a text console. The touchpad and left/right click buttons were still working, and the keyboard still worked in the Grub boot menu.

A bit of head scratching, and plugging in a separate USB keyboard allowed me to type again. But that isn't quite an optimal solution. A bit of Googling led me to the following bug report for someone else with an LG laptop. Going by the eighth comment in that, it turns out a couple of options have to be added to the grub menu, by editing the /etc/default/grub file. In my case, the file had the following line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

I added two options to the end, so it became:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i8042.nopnp=1 i8042.dumbkbd=1"

Saved the file, and ran sudo update-grub to let the changes apply, and rebooted. I am now typing this blog post on the working laptop keyboard!

New keyboard! And more on Windows 7

This post is basically inspired solely by the fact that I have bought a new keyboard and need an excuse to do a lot of typing on it. After finally having enough of interference, non-responsiveness and battery changes, I ditched by former wireless keyboard and mouse combo and bought a couple of new ones - a Logitech M500 corded mouse and an Illuminated keyboard. It has a nice, laptop-style key feel with just a little more travel, with the added bonus of keys that light up for use in a dark room.

I love it. Ubuntu picked it up without a problem, all keys working just fine. Windows detected it as well, but after installing drivers for it, insisted on a reboot. Some things never change. I didn't bother installing the setpoint software that is included - no need for it in my opinion.

As a progress update on my dual-boot exploits, there have been good points and bad about windows.

The good:

Sleep actually works. It worked even better when I downloaded a patch that stopped it crashing on resume when the hard drive didn't wake up in time. In Ubuntu, I only ever got to a blank screen with a blinking cursor when I tried the suspend feature.

Full-screen flash videos work with hardware acceleration. Only 5-10% CPU utilisation, compared with almost maxing-out a core under linux. This is due to differing stages of development of Adobe's flash player.

General polish and feel of the desktop. You can tell a lot of work has gone into this. The help functionality is excellent as well - far better than Ubuntu's vague documentation.

Backup works great - nice and straightforward, asking to also create a startup disc for system recovery. In Ubuntu, I am using backintime. While it is great for making backups, restoring from them is not so straightforward. Must look into an image based program.

Homegroups work great - it found the other Windows 7 PC on the network with no problems and is effortlessly sharing files between them. I can even use the printer connected to the other machine - a Canon that has stuff-all driver support under linux.

The bad:

While sleep works, the simpler task of powering off the screen after a set period seems more difficult for it. It doesn't always do it. Then again, a number of XP systems at my work have problems with that as well - and they are factory Dell and HP boxen.

The media centre application isn't quite up there with MythTV, one of linux's killer apps, in my opinion. Guide data is only available from the networks' broadcast guide, and I can't find a way to get it to set up two tuners. Actually, finding any documentation on it is somewhat difficult.

All the rebooting needed. It's still there, and it gets old pretty quick.

I think I'll be dual-booting for a while longer, especially since MythTV will not be replaced any time soon. It has been interesting though, and I am learning the interface and all. I have noticed a lot of fixes since the Release Candidate that I was running last year on the other PC.

(Originally posted on January 29, 2010 on my other blog)