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I'm on an Acer Aspire E5 and I haven't been able to get my laptop's onboard keyboard and trackpad to work, although the trackpad is detected as a Synaptics, and the keyboard is showing as an AT Translated Set 2 keyboard. External mouse and keyboard works fine, and are what I am currently using.

I already checked whether I'm on Synaptics or Libinput, although I was fairly certain that upgrade happened a few years ago, and I am definitely using libinput, which I reinstalled, to no avail. I've made sure that the trackpad is enabled in the system settings, and I've switched it from advanced mode to basic in the BIOS, which for some seemed to have been the solution

I'd like to note that the onboard keyboard works fine on boot, and its only when X is loaded (i'm assuming) that it fails.

I have just recently installed Kubuntu on this machine after grappling with the same issue on Arch, thinking i had done something wrong in the installation. On Arch, I had no trouble using the keyboard on the TTY and live-USB (Arch and Ubuntu), but when i installed X for a GUI, they both stopped working.

What should my next steps be?

shoebill
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1 Answers1

11

There is a bug in recent kernels that disables some laptop keyboards. Mainly Acer and HP so far. Can usually go to recovery and boot from kernel 5.4.0-42 or use an external keyboard.

Blacklisting the intel_vbtn kernel module is a workaround for this, as seen in Why my laptop's keyboard screwed up since kernel 5.4.0-47 till 5.8.0-20

To implement this, you can either create a new file in /etc/modprobe.d with the suffix .conf or use the main blacklist.conf file. The former may be preferable, since you can then just delete the file when it is no longer required (i.e. when the bug is fixed):

sudoedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-intel_vbtn.conf

Add a line to the file, optionally with a comment explaining why you are doing this

# bug in module breaks keyboard, so don't load it
blacklist intel_vbtn

Save the file, exit and reboot.

Zanna
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crip659
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