Bugzilla – Bug 1174
Input device issues on Asus Eee PC
Last modified: 2008-10-06 09:52:45 UTC
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On an Asus Eee PC (8GB solid-state "disk", 1GB RAM), the built-in input devices -- keyboard and trackpad/buttons -- may or may not function on a given boot of the LiveCD. I've booted this device off of the OpenSolaris 2008-05 RC0 CD quite a few times, and most of the time I'm unable to attempt an install as the system appears to not recognize the built-in keyboard. On about every fifth try the keyboard works and I'm able to respond to the 'keyboard' and 'language' questions so that the LiveCD will bring up the desktop. In most cases, once the desktop is reached, the system does not respond to the built-in trackpad & associated buttons. Plugging in an external mouse works around the problem. On one attempt the system did respond to the trackpad, but on all other attempts it did not. The keyboard and trackpad always function when the Eee PC is booted on the Linux install that came with the system, so this doesn't appear to be a problem with the hardware.
Do they function on Nevada build 86? Trying to narrow down whether this is an Indiana configuration problem or a general driver problem.
Haven't tried build 86 yet, but I installed RC2 to an external USB disk from a working laptop, then plugged that USB disk into the Eee PC. It was able to boot from this disk. There were no problems with the input devices during boot through login and onto the desktop: everything worked fine in that regard. The system was perfectly usable. I then connected an external USB CD to the Eee PC and booted it directly off an RC2 livecd: I wasn't able to answer the first question about which keyboard layout to use - no keypresses were accepted. Using a USB keyboard worked around the problem. Once I got to the desktop, modunloading kb8042, and modloading it again (then waiting a while) worked around the problem.
Moving to hardware
Hi,folks I tried to install nevada b86 and b87 on my EeePC. they have problem same as OpenSolaris,the build-in keyboard doesn't work when installing on EeePC. (After installing,the build-in works well.)so We need external usb keyboard when installing. I also tried to install OpenSolaris DP2,I saw the problem about build-in keyboard as Tim said. After installing that,booting from SDHC,there are no problem using build-in keyboard.
I've recently installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 on an eeepc and faced the same issue with the keyboard. Playing around with arguments to the kernel line on GRUB showed that -v brings the keyboard back to life (I later found this documented in http://blogs.sun.com/rolfk/entry/opensolaris_2008_05_on_the). The installation completed without problems, but the issue reappeared after reboot. This time, the keyboard would not even work during GRUB. Removing and reattaching the battery solved the issue. I booted with -v and added it to menu.lst
For a less verbose workaround, forceload'ing kb8042 in /etc/system does the trick nicely. There's a corresponding bugtraq bug 6695011 P2 driver/i8042 kb8042 driver does not support built in keyboard for Asus EEE PC which suggests a race in kb8042 iirc.