Bug 272750

Summary:	USB keyboard not reconized during installation unable to select installation
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.3	Reporter:	Lyn Felton <lfelton>
Component:	Installation	Assignee:	Steffen Winterfeldt <snwint>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	cgroneman, squan
Version:	Alpha 3
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Lyn Felton 2007-05-09 15:35:24 UTC

1) Boot with CD1
2) Selection screen is shown - cannot cursor to select installation
3) System boots from hard-drive which is not my intention

Unable to install openSUSE 10.3 at this time as my system does not support a PS2 keyboard connection

Comment 2 Matej Horvath 2007-05-11 12:31:52 UTC

What BIOS and motherboard do you have? Please check that you have Legacy USB" or "Legacy keyboard" enabled in your BIOS and try these steps:


0) hold down SHIFT while the boot loader starts. Then turn off the display/monitor detection (answer the other questions with 'y'). Does that improve things?


1) ensure CAPS LOCK is on while starting the boot loader. This will bring up the penguin theme. Normally, the upper penguin will change direction when you hit any key. Now: do modifiers like Shift, Alt, Ctrl have an effect?

2) does the BIOS start to beep after pressing a number of keys (indicating it's keyboard buffer is full)?


Could you please try other versions of opensuse?

Comment 3 Chad Groneman 2007-05-18 22:20:26 UTC

I also have this problem, with alpha4. To answer your questions:

- Holding SHIFT while Grub starts, I am able to disable graphics detection and begin an install.
- If CAPS LOCK is on, the Penguin screen does come up, but no key does anything
- If I press a lot of keys, the system does beep a lot, BUT, not until it is past GRUB completely, as if the queue is locked. The system boots from the CD into GRUB. No keyboard response (unless I hold shift, as described above). The CD Grub defaults to boot off the local hard disk, which it does. In my case this is GRUB from opensuse 10.2. I STILL cannot get the keyboard to respond. The local copy of GRUB from 10.2 then boots the Linux Kernel. At that point is when all the queued beeps come.

I did try to verify it was unique to 10.3, but I found that I also had the same problem with the 10.2 DVD now. The installed GRUB (from 10.2) works when it is alone, but not when it is called from a boot CD (10.2 or 10.3 a4). The 10.2 must have worked originally. I did upgrade my BIOS since installing 10.2, which I think is highly relevant.

My System is a Dell Dimension E510. I use the x86_64 DVDs to install. When I installed 10.2, I believe I had BIOS revision A05. Now I have A07.

Please let me know what other information I can provide. I am holding off on installing 10.3 on this system until I am reasonably sure that I will be able to boot my system. Right now I am worried that if I overwrote the existing grub, I would not be able to boot properly.

Comment 4 Steffen Winterfeldt 2007-05-31 12:10:59 UTC

It's a known issue with some Dell BIOS versions. See bug 241316.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 241316 ***

Comment 5 Chad Groneman 2007-05-31 14:19:19 UTC

Bug 241316 is not public.  Can you make it public?

Comment 6 Steffen Winterfeldt 2007-05-31 14:43:12 UTC

given you access

Comment 7 Stefan Quandt 2007-06-01 14:05:51 UTC

With newer Dell dimension E520 boxes we have the same problem.

And another company I know they have the same problem and switched to RH feodora because Dell gives no support.

Is their any workaround?
What is the status of Bug 241316?

Comment 8 Steffen Winterfeldt 2007-06-01 14:31:10 UTC

The workaround is to either down-/upgrade to a working bios version or to
turn off graphics (boot with SHIFT pressed/remove the gfxmenu line
in /boot/grub/menu.lst).

There's no progress in bug 241316.

Comment 9 Stefan Quandt 2007-06-07 11:51:55 UTC

Thanks for your quick answer, this was a big help.

On behalf of non-disclosed Bug 241316:
With Ubuntu 7.04 there is no such problem: The graphical boot menu accepts input from USB keyboard with the mentioned machine.

Comment 10 Steffen Winterfeldt 2007-06-11 10:52:44 UTC

Yes, I know. They use the code from SL 10.1 which works on those Dell
machines. As I don't have a machine to reproduce this here I can't say
what exactly is causing this.

Comment 11 Stefan Quandt 2007-06-12 06:29:45 UTC

In fact I have this problem with 10.1 on a Dell Dimension E520 with BIOS 2.3.2 (as of 03/30/07).
So if Ubuntu is really based on 10.1, this would mean that they have fixed it.