No keyboard or mouse in X

[Geoffrey Romer <gromer@hmc.edu>]

I've been having some trouble setting up a friend with a Debian system.

First, I installed Debian 2.2 (stable) from CD, using the normal install
methods. The mouse (a USB mouse) worked fine under X, using /dev/psaux (I 
think). The keyboard (a PS/2 keybaord) worked at the console, but not under 
X. On further investigation, we found that a USB keyboard would work under 
both X and the console.

In an attempt to rectify this and other problems, I switched to deb-unstable,
including an upgrade to XFree4 and kernel 2.4.5. After the upgrade was
complete, we found that the keyboard worked at the console, but neither
the keyboard nor the mouse worked under X. This was true of both the PS/2 and
USB keyboards, the USB mouse, and the USB mouse, fitted with an adapter and
plugged into the PS/2 port.

Investigating further I found the following odd behavior: running cat 
/dev/psaux produces the message "keyboard: Timeout - AT keyboard not present?"
Wiggling the mouse then produces garbage, as would be expected for a working
mouse.

XF86Config is set up to listen to /dev/psaux, and yet X simply doesn't
recognize keyboard or mouse input. I don't think it's a protocol problem, 
because moving the mouse produces no response at all, rather than the garbled
pointer behavior a bad protocol would suggest.

Ideally, we'd like the PS/2 keyboard and the USB mouse to work, but if anyone
can suggest a way to get any combination of keyboard and mouse working, I'd
be grateful.

-- 
Geoffrey M. Romer
gromer@hmc.edu
---
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right"
                                                          -Salvor Hardin
"I can't leave you alone with this man! He might be a tenor!"
                                                          -Fred Astaire