Dell Vostro 1310 - keyboard does not work using Linux (most of the time)

Question

I have a Dell Vostro 1310 laptop since last Thursday. And I do have problems running Linux:

-sometimes (about 60% of the time) the keyboard (and mouse) does not work when I start the computer into Linux. This goes for Knoppix from DVD and Gentoo from CD. It also goes for my installed versions of Gentoo and Ubuntu.

I am running out of options to fix this: Dell techsupport says they only support the preinstalled Windows Vista. But since it happens quite random, and even from different installation-CD's (sometimes they work, sometimes not!) I am quite sure it is hardware related. However, since Vista worked fine and the keyboard itself works fine (up to loading Grub it works fine, I can select a kernel in grub, and directly after loading the kernel, the keyboard might stop working... ), so techsupport can not help me.

However, I read at this forum that various people have a successfull Linux-installation on their Vostro 1310, and also Google only gives rare examples of keyboards working on and off at boot, so I really don't know what to do anymore...

combuster · Answer

I had that same problem on openSuSE11.0 but when i installed ubuntu everything worked out of the box. Only thing that can cross my mind (cause i dont belive in random errors caused by random issues) is that some other peripheral is causing the conflict. Does your keybord stopped working when u plugged in usb mouse or keyboard? In opensuse problem 4me started when i disabled second mouse device that sax2 found (i dont know why cause i didnt used external mouse). Also check your settings within input device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Should be something like this:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "Generic Keyboard"
    Driver        "kbd"
    Option        "XkbRules"    "xorg"
    Option        "XkbModel"    "pc105"
    Option        "XkbLayout"    "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "Configured Mouse"
    Driver        "mouse"
    Option        "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "Synaptics Touchpad"
    Driver        "synaptics"
    Option        "SendCoreEvents"    "true"
    Option        "Device"        "/dev/psaux"
    Option        "Protocol"        "auto-dev"
    Option        "HorizEdgeScroll"    "0"
EndSection

Best of luck...

Linux General

Dell Vostro 1310 - keyboard does not work using Linux (most of the time)

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