USB Keyboard and mouse do not work after installing Lubuntu
I've just installed Lubuntu 14 on an older machine (Dell Optiplex 780). Everything works fine on the live-USB drive, installation etc. When the machine boots to the newly installed operating system, neither the keyboard nor mouse work. I've ruled out the following:
- I have tried all USB ports.
- I have tried both an HP and apple keyboard, and a logitech mouse.
- Re-plugging the devices in after boot does not help.
- Toggeling BIOS compatibility flags does not resolve the issue
- All USB ports are enabled in the BIOS.
- Machine is not frozen, it can respond to the power button and goes to sleep after a defined period.
- The machine is not using USB3.0 ports
- Linux Mint and Ubuntu install without issue
The following reports are similar:
- Installing ubuntu 14 LTS : keyboard and mouse do not function (never resolved)
- After doing a fresh install of Ubuntu 13.10 my USB Keyboard and mouse won't work (never resolved)
- (never resolved)
- is for a different desktop environment, and for a different problem, but is possibly related
It is unlikely to be identical to bug 1244176 because it does not occur during install.
Workaround: install Linux Mint
Edit: it occurs to me that the images I'm using to install are retrieved from unetbootin on OSX. They may not be current. I will try a different image tomorrow.
Edit: There are far worse problems now. The system is sporadically not booting, refusing to boot from live-USB, and sometimes keyboards aren't even working in the BIOS. I am giving up. Something is terribly wrong.
11 Answer
I believe that the program unetbootin silently fails to produce a valid bootable installation disk. Installing from the corrupted disk appears to succeed, but falls short of installing the full system, leading to hard to diagnose errors.
Unetbootin may not work with all distros [e.g. 1 2 3], or all images of a given distro. I suspect it also may fail somewhat stochastically, e.g. if a sporadic disk error is encountered, it may fail silently, but succeed if no errors occur.
My recommendation for anyone experiencing similar weirdness is to create the bootable USB directly, on the command line, and to avoid unetbootin completely. The commands I used on OSX to create an installation disk are
hdiutil convert -format UDTO -o DOWNLOAD_LINUX_INSTALLER.iso
sudo diskutil unmount /Volumes/VOLUMENAME/
sudo dd if=DOWNLOAD_LINUX_INSTALLER.iso.cdr of=/dev/disk#Where disk# should be replaced by the device file for your USB drive. On my system it was disk1.
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