I got myself up and running on Linux again, so I don’t have to suffer through the tyranny of trying to use Windows at home or to try to convince my wife to spend more money than we have on a laptop. To be honest, the installation was a piece of cake, everything was taken care of default — even the traditionally difficult pieces like internal wireless networking and the little special buttons like volume controls and even the special calculator button worked without any intervention at all.

Then I rebooted, and instead of the happy hp logo post screen I get a rapidly blinking cursor for like 10 seconds. Then it finally gets to the post screen but sits there for about 20 seconds or so. Um, okay… never seen that before. Then I get to the dual boot prompt (grub) that lets me select between Linux and Windows. Since I’m most interested to make sure that my work stuff is still alright I hit the down arrow a couple of times to select that option.

Except.

Er.

Oops?

What?

Okay, that’s totally frigging uncool. It doesn’t accept any keyboard input at all and boots right back into Linux. This does not make me happy, though the keyboard and everything else is working just fine once it all boots up in the lovely Ubuntu Linux Gnome environment. I try to reboot again, trying to select the F9 or F10 options at boot this time to get into the BIOS options, and throw in some of the other traditional BIOS keys like ESC and F8 and F2, but nothing works.

So now I’m a bit worried. Before I installed this I cleared it with my TOTALLY AWESOME BOSS WHO RULES AND I’M NOT JUST SAYING THAT BECAUSE HE READS THIS BLOG SOMETIMES by casually mentioning “hey, do you think IT would care if I installed Linux on this computer?” over lunch. I didn’t however ask “hey do you think IT would care if I rendered this machine useless for my primary work task because I am a zealot freak idiot who cannot use windows at home?” which seems at this point to be the relevant question.
Thankfully, after a bit of googling I managed to get it All Worked Out. Turns out that for a couple of hp/compaq models when you shutdown Linux you have to explicitly tell it “modprobe -r psmouse” before shutting down. I tested this completely unlikely solution but sure enough it solved the problem, when I executed that and rebooted I could use the keyboard at the OS selection menu fine and I could get back into my work stuff just fine. Whew.

I then added a simple init script to run that modprobe -r command on reboot and shutdown, so now everything is happy and works just fine. And I’m happier than a pig in, er, mud, now that I can use my favourite apps and have stuff work and be less annoying than everything in stupid Windows. And once my internet starts working again, which it seems to most be doing lately (knock on wood) then I’ll be able to do stuff from home again that I miss doing.