On 02/25/2013 02:39 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote:
There isn't just one USB keyboard driver; there are many.
I see. Since my keyboard works in BIOS and GRUB, I suppose this means the driver is present in those places, or they are using some legacy user input approach that wouldn't be appropriate for the rescue shell?
Now maybe we should include the right driver for whatever you had plugged in during installation.
That seems reasonable.
But what if you don't have a keyboard plugged in? What if you plug a different model of keyboard in, that needs a specialised driver?
A valid concern, but in analogy to plugging in a different model keyboard, one could install say an add-on video card to use in place of built-in video. Either way, that's changing the hardware, so a targeted build may legitimately fail. But my keyboard was present at time of install, so one would expect it to work.
This is why 'generic' is usually the right answer.
Good to know. That was the default, but the associated debconf explanatory text warned that a generic build might be too large to boot, which tempted the experiment with changing the value.
If keyboard support can't be improved in time for the Debian 7.0 release, could at least the debconf explanatory text include "(Note: initramfs includes a rescue shell for boot failures. The targeted build doesn't include any USB keyboard drivers.)" ?
Thanks! Alex