Comment 84 for bug 555169

When I upgraded my Dell Inspiron 2650 from Hardy Heron to Lucid my onboard keyboard and mousepad died. Appears to be bug 555169.

If I:
sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
then comment out the line
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
to be
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
keyboard and mousepad work again and it has the advantage that I see the reports as the computer boots.

If I leave it uncommented but add acpi=off as follows

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=off" it also works but has the disadvantage it turns off the acpi which takes away some functionality.

I found that commenting and uncommenting the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" line made the fault reproducible every time. A usb keyboard and mouse always worked so I got the following test result.

with the line uncommented (natural state) using dmesg | grep i8042 I got
[ 0.802963] i8042.c: Can't read CTR while initializing i8042.
[ 1.530601] i8042: probe of i8042 failed with error -5

with the Linux_Default line commented (fixed) and then using dmesg | grep i8042 I got
[ 0.341694] serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1
[ 0.341845] serio: i8042 AUX port at 0x60,0x64 irq 12
[ 0.368314] input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /devices/platform/i8042/serio0/input/input5
[ 19.906063] input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input7

On site http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1474694 someone says it is still a problem on Meerkat
and on the next page http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1474694&page=2 someone says they cured it with a bios update.
Could it be a Dell bios bug? I can't get a bios update into my machine.
I get RBU Bios Update not supported on this system

Hope someone can track this down and fix it permanently.