Notebooks & Netbooks

[rnewby0]

I have downloaded UUI and Lucid Puppy onto USB stick OK, Changed BIOS boot order OK, restarted and Puppy booted OK from USB. Problem is, there is absolutely no response from the keyboard or touch pad. Not even Esc or Ctrl+Alt+Del. Got to be settings on the laptop or driver missing or something of that nature I would have thought, but I'm lost?????? Can anyone help please. Thanks

[JackE]

Is the still keyboard functional before the puppy has a chance to boot?

Jack E/NJ 

[rnewby0]

The keyboard is fine in Windows 7 before booting puppy

[JackE]

Do you have a USB keyboard that you can try to maneuver around puppy? Some of the puppy forums relate to this very same problem.

Also, have you considered a virtual puppy machine? I'm currently running Win98SE, WinXP, and an older Suse distro as guests on this Win7 machine under VMWare's player.  I still consider it "the best" of virtual environments and it's now freeware. Virtuals are a whole lot better than having to deal with multiboots, bootsticks and partitioning. I can run all of them, all at the same time on the same machine as well as talk between them via the network. 

Jack E/BJ  

[rnewby0]

Thanks JackE. for the info. But I don't have a USB keyboard I can try, and the whole idea of having puppy on a memory stick is the portability so I can take it with me and use other machines

[JackE]

At this point, it appears that something in the puppy boot config is at fault since your KB is still alive at POST. In the old dos days before I started messing with virtual environments, I tweaked LINLOAD switches to get around similar (but not the same as yours) boot problems specific to my machine at the time. As far as I know, GRUB and LILO still mess with the MBR which I've always been reluctant to do. And thus, in your case,  wouldn't make the stick very portable. I think somehow you've gotta find out what on that stick is disabling the KB and pad. Can you read the stick at all? Perhaps a tweakable conf file is on it somewhere?

Jack E/NJ         

[rnewby0 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the info.

But found some info here: 
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1555029 
Updating the BIOS to v1.17 fixed the keyboard problem.

Altough I found it scary risking creating a brick, updating BIOS from v1.10 to v1.17 cured the problem.

[JackE]

mewby0>>> the whole idea of having puppy on a memory stick is the portability so I can take it with me and use other machines>>>

I'm happy for you that the bios upsdate was successful! I guess I'm more scared of flashing than playing with partitions & MBRs even if it didn't seem like a major revision. However, what about the portability factor you talked about? I reviewed your ubuntu forum link and IMO Amanranthius's workaround seems to be more suited to your needs. Let's put it this way --- if you asked to stick boot my machine but had to chance bricking it in order to use the keyboard --- what do you think my answer would be? 8^)  

Jack E/NJ

[rnewby0]

Hi JackE,

I take your point, But I wouldn't dream of messing with anyone else's BIOS. The intention is to use it in my own machine when out and about but using someone else's WiFi. Thus being able to sucurely use online banking etc, without the risk of keylogging of paswords and the like. 

  Of course I could use other people's machines with their permission, and just changing their boot sequence ( if neccessary ) to boot from USB, it would not damage their machine.

   I'm a nice person (ha ha), I wouldn't do anything to cause anybody any grief .