Comment 79 for bug 254840

I, too, have the same problem on a IBM T30 laptop. I decided to upgrade from Hardy and all seemed fine until it rebooted. Since last night I've been searching the 'net looking for solutions, and so far nothing has worked. I've reconfigured and reloaded about every appropriate package I can think of including all the suggestions I found here and on the 'net and No Go.

Clearly, to me anyway, it was a hal/dbus issue and so, after running a reconfigure on both of these packages with no luck, ultimately here is what I have to do every time I start the system:

CTRL-ALT-F1
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart

One line was obviously noticeable:

  Stopping System Tools Backends system-tools-backends
    start-stop-daemon: warning: failed to kill 1234: no such process

  Starting System Tools Backends system-tools-backends

Then Alt-F7 and back to the GDM login prompt and all is fine. The mouse and keyboard work as they are supposed to work.

An Ah-Ha moment, a system-tools-backends problem? I checked the man pages and no configuration available. Bummer.

After that,I rebooted and tried to just restart system-tools-backends and got the same error message but no mouse or keyboard at the GDM prompt, as usual. So I restarted dbus, system-tools-backends stopped normally, all restarted fine and the keyboard and mouse again worked with no problems in X.

I noticed that in /etc/rc5.d system-tools-backends was started at S30 while dbus was started at S51. Maybe that was it? I ran chkconfig system-tools-backends off and then back on and it moved to S51. Still no go. Although I don't get the initial dbus (system-tools-backends) restart error I mentioned at the top of this post anymore it did not fix the keyboard/mouse issue.

I then tried moving gdm from S30 to S52 (just after hal and dbus start) - no dice.

So I then tried adding "/etc/init.d/dbus restart" to the rc.local script - no dice.

Finally I then tried adding "/etc/init.d/gdm reload" to the rc.local script and that worked, but it's a hack. I have to wait while gdm loads, flashes off and then reloads before I can log in.

So now I'm stuck. Every time I start the system I have to go to a terminal, restart dbus and all is fine or add /etc/init.d/gdm reload to the /etc/rc.local file which seems a little silly to me.

Has anyone come up with a solution to this yet?

John C.