[CentOS] keyboard problem

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday, August 09, 2011 01:29:09 PM bcb wrote:
> OK, I know what I'm doing is "officially unsupported",
...
> I have a CentOS 5.6 system running as a virtual machine using VMware 
> player.  I cloned the system, booted the clone to make sure everything 
> worked after cloning, it did.  I then booted off a CentOS 6 ISO and did an 
> upgrade (I know, unsupported!).  I've got the system to the point where 
> everything works except the keyboard.

Well, I ran into an ephemeral issue yesterday during a scratch install of C6 onto VMware ESX 3.5U5 (also not supported, but this time it's unsupported by VMware, not by CentOS).  The install went well, and the initial update (200+ packages or so) went well, but the first reboot did not.  

I got a 'prefdm respawning too fast' issue and a text-mode console; I switched to a different VC, logged in as root, and issued a startx.  Both the keyboard and mouse went away, and I could neither click on anything nor even switch to a different VC.  I had to reset the VM hard, and was expecting a long day of troubleshooting, but when it rebooted that time it came up without issue, and everything works ok.