After intrepid upgrade, kdm won't take input; shutdown also fails

[doom]

Upgrading from the hardy-kde4-remix on an AMD64-based laptop
(Alvio MS-103) resulted in a kdm log-in screen that refused to take
any input (it didn't seem to recognize mouse or keyboard). It was
however, possible to log-in after a "Control-Shift-Alt F4", or by
coming in over the ethernet port via ssh.

Perhaps worse than this, the system no-longer shut-down cleanly.
The command "/sbin/shutdown -h now" would exit X but leave linux
running. I needed to pull the battery to do a hard boot.

After a lot of experimentation, I looked at what ?dm code I was trying to run:

In /etc/rc3.d I found links for:

  lrwxrwxrwx 1 doom doom 13 2008-12-13 06:21 S13kdm -> ../init.d/kdm
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-18 00:11 S30gdm -> ../init.d/gdm
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2008-04-09 23:39 S99kdm-kde4 -> ../init.d/kdm-kde4

I removed the symlink for kdm-kde4, and when that didn't fix the
problem, I removed the kdm package. Now I get a functional gdm
log-in screen.

But: I still can't log-out cleanly. I was getting error messages for
trying to shut-down kdm when it wasn't running, so I used
update-rc.d to remove all of the kdm symlinks, but I find I still
can't shutdown without pulling the battery.

Did some web searches and found a work-around: added "acpi=force" to the kernel lines in grub's menu.lst (I also deleted the horrible "quiet splash" options while I was at it). Now I can
shutdown cleanly.

[Kaulbach (mystic-scientist)]

Referred to kubuntu-kde4-meta

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Kubuntu 8.04 has fallen out of support, and 8.10 will at the end of this month, so this is a won't fix.