X deletes input devices

Today I restarted my notebook to boot into another kernel. Unfortunately I couldn’t log-in to the desktop because neither the mouse nor the keyboard was working. The Xorg.log gave me a hint what happened.

That all affected my GRML installation. Unfortunately you can’t change to a virtual terminal while there is no keyboard control, so to change anything you have to connect via SSH or boot from live CD or USB. The error reported in /var/log/Xorg.0.log looks like:

(WW) AllowEmptyInput is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or 'vmmouse' will be disabled.
(WW) Disabling Mouse0
(WW) Disabling Keyboard0

So you see, all input device are turned off. Annoying!! To avoid this problem you have to add the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf :

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
        Option "AllowEmptyInput" "false" 
EndSection

That should solve the problem. If you don’t have a xorg.conf yet you can create one with:

Xorg -configure

This will create /root/xorg.conf.new , so you just have to copy it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf .

Since it was the first reboot for about 30 days and I updated/installed a lot of new software, so I’m not able to blame anyone generating this bug. But if you are feel free to do so ;-)