Keyboard Not Working in Xorg After Booting Ubuntu

I’ve had a weird issue a couple of times on my work computer, where the keyboard and the mouse does not respond in Xorg after rebooting. As I only reboot my work computer every 80 days or so, I tend to forget the reason why it happens between each boot sequence.

The reason why the mouse and keyboard does not work after rebooting at my computer is that HAL or DBUS failed to start. I’ve not dug further into this issue, as it doesn’t happen very often. The solution:

(you can switch to a text console by pressing ctrl+alt+f1, your keyboard will work there)

/etc/init.d/dbus start
/etc/init.d/hal start

Restart X / GDM:

/etc/init.d/gdm restart

Switch back to the Xorg terminal (alt+f7) and hopefully your keyboard and mouse will yet again work!

Even More Programming Challenges

Estimate (one of the two conspirators in “The Rule of Estimate and Dibon”) directed me to The Sphere Online Judge today. If you’ve grown tired of the challenges over at Project Euler or just want something different for a change, head on over. The challenges ranges from quite simple to very complex, and this time you’ll have to provide the program that solves the problem. This means that there is a time factor present and you can’t solve the problem using parallell processing.

For those who have attended NWERC or another version of ACMs programming contests, this is the same stuff (“NM i Programmering” for the norwegian people out there). Go go go!