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All of a sudden, neither the pointer nor the return key on my laptop is working in the 16.04 GUI. All the other keys work just fine, as far as I can tell. And the return key does work at the shutdown/restart/suspend/lock prompt (which I get by pressing and holding the power button).

The return key works just fine at the kernel’s “unlock sdaX_crypt” prompt, and at the root shell prompt in recovery mode.

Most of the “pointer not working” troubleshooting guides involve typing stuff in the terminal, which I can’t get to because the return key isn’t working.

How to go about troubleshooting this from the root shell prompt??

Bolio
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1 Answers1

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Never figured out the cause of my problem, but FWIW this is what worked: Plug in a USB mouse, but not a USB keyboard. This rendered the touchpad and return key temporarily functional. Then edit grub as described in the second solution here:

Edit /etc/default/grub to replace:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

with

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="i8042.reset quiet splash"

Save the file and then update grub using

sudo update-grub command

Then restart the system.

Bolio
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