[Discuss] Inability of GRUB to Recognize USB Logitech Keyboard

[Patrick]

On Tue, 20 May 2008 15:54:46 -0700
"Gordon M. Craig" wrote:

> Strange, Joan, because I too have a Logitech keyboard and i have all the
> functions present without loading anything; hot keys for mail, movies
> &c, plus a volume control for the audio as well as a "stifle" key (as
> in, "Stifle yourself, Edith/or Meathead. . ." All these functions worked
> with every version of Ubuntu with nary a hiccup.

Probably works for her friend too, once the system is up and
running, but not for Grub [right at startup, before the system
loads].  I suspect the person has a dual- or multi-boot setup, and
is stuck with the default or no boot at all, because he or she
can't navigate the Grub menu right when the machine starts up.

No keyboard = no arrow-keys = no choice.

If they can't boot either system [shows a menu, but none of the
options work], perhaps they can boot off a live CD, and edit the
/boot/grub/menu.lst on their hard-drive.

Like this;

[...]
#
# You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not change this entry to 'saved' or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
default		0
# or another number.  Zero would be the first item in the Grub menu.

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout		10

## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
hiddenmenu

[...]

If the keyboard continues to not work, I can write a script that
uses a multiple copies of Grub's boot list, with different
`defaults' defined, and swaps them around depending which system
they want to boot next startup.

So at the terminal, they could type;
    nextboot win
or lin, bsd, lin1, lin2 or whatever, depending which system they
want to boot next time around.

Yes it's kludgy, but it could work.  Sound good?


> 
> Gordon.

Patrick.

-- 
Charlie was a chemist,
But Charlie is no more.
For what he thought was H2O,
Was H2SO4.