Linux Bios problem

[cranston]

I am relative newbie to Linux, qand I am having a very peculiar problem installing it on old fashioned emachines e4084 PC. After succcessfully installing the latest version of ubuntu desktop (10.04) i find that neither my mouse or keyboard work. Throughout the installation process both the keyboard and the mouse work. After the installation neither work, occasionally, ubuntu does not boot it the GUI, I am left with the system prompt, (initramfs). At this prompt I have minimal bash like functionality, I have over come this up till now by rebooting the PC with success.

I have also installed the latest version of Ubuntu server, everything works fine at the installation, at the non gui login I succesfully enter my user name and password, but after that I can only enter 1 letter and nothing more I.e. ;# l, when I want to enter :# ls

I have successfully reinstalled windows Xp with no problem whatsoever. Does anybody have any ideas please
I am relative newbie to Linux, qand I am having a very peculiar problem installing it on old fashioned emachines e4084 PC. After succcessfully installing the latest version of ubuntu desktop (10.04) i find that neither my mouse or keyboard work. Throughout the installation process both the keyboard and the mouse work. After the installation neither work, occasionally, ubuntu does not boot it the GUI, I am left with the system prompt, (initramfs). At this prompt I have minimal bash like functionality, I have over come this up till now by rebooting the PC with success.

I have also installed the latest version of Ubuntu server, everything works fine at the installation, at the non gui login I succesfully enter my user name and password, but after that I can only enter 1 letter and nothing more I.e. ;# l, when I want to enter :# ls

I have successfully reinstalled windows Xp with no problem whatsoever. Does anybody have any ideas please

[reed9]

I would firstly try a couple of different distros and see if this seems to be an Ubuntu specific problem with your hardware.

Is there anything unusual about your mouse or keyboard? What are the machine's specs?

If you're up for a challenge, I've personally had success with Arch Linux on an old laptop where numerous other distros failed.

[cranston]

thanks for the quick response reed9. i have tried other distros in particular fedora desktop, and have got the same response. as far as i can make out there is nothing unusual albout my mouse or keyboard. in the past, the specification of emachines pc has been a cause of derision among others. the thing that i can't understand is that if upgrade ubuntu 8.10 to 10.4 i don't seem to get the problem.

[reed9]

Hmm, well, 8.04 still used an xorg.conf file. It's optional now, but doesn't come by default. I assume the old xorg.conf isn't removed during upgrade and I wonder if that's the difference.

You could boot up 8.04, copy the xorg.conf to a flash drive, and add it to 10.04.

It's also weird that it works in the live environment but not after install. Is that the same across distros?