If your keyboard and mouse are not working in X in Slackware 13…
At least once a week I see someone with this issue.
With reference to my earlier post about Xorg + Hal, by default, Xorg in Slackware 13 gets its hardware information from hald instead of an xorg.conf file. If you have no xorg.conf file and hald is not running, your keyboard and mouse will not work when you start X.
- The Cause: You disabled or broke hal.
- The Solution: Darwinist Determinism.
Failing the first solution:
/etc/rc.d/rc.hald start
Then restart X or reboot (probably easier to just reboot and it clears any anomalies).
If it still doesn’t work, check that your /etc/rc.d/rc.hald script is not empty (I don’t know how he did it, but I did see someone who’d zeroed his script during an upgrade).
If it still doesn’t work, then you probably actually have a problem rather than just a failure on your part and it’s time to go searching for likely causes. Best place to start would be to google your specific hardware in relation to hal.
If you’ve made modications to rc.M (which calls rc.hald) before upgrading the new file will be labelled rc.M,new. This will prevent the keyboard and mouse from working under X and prevent the above suggestion from working smoothly. Rename rc.M.new to rc.M and reboot.
@Richard Wheeldon You should upgrade using slackpkg, after it is complete it will run new-config (or you can run it manually with “slackpkg new-config”) which will look through your /etc directory for .new files and allow you to manage them appropriately either individually or en masse.
Another reason for mouse and keyboard not working on Slackware 13 is that users had installed another version of DBus than the default one (which is 1.2.14 in Slackware 13)
@Huy Phan
Indeed there are many possible reasons, but the one in the article has affected a huge number of people due to a change to the way Slackware works rather than something the user has just broken.