I've had a long standing problem with the keyboard being disabled at boot time. It is important to point out the exact time at which the keyboard is disabled or, better yet, not enabled by the kernel.

So, in the boot loader, the keyboard works fine! However, when loading the kernel and drivers for all sorts of devices, the keyboard sometimes would not get enabled. I know this is not a hardware fault for two reasons: first, I have dual boot and the problem never happened in Windows, ever, whereas in Linux it was happening more than 50% of the times I booted; finally, the keyboard always worked fine in the bootloader.

After having installed the new version of the official NVIDIA drivers (version 310.44), I noticed some error messages in the system log. The NVIDIA driver was complaining about the "vesa" driver, as explained in the post NVIDIA driver. It seems that by fixing the problem, as explained in that post, the keyboard problem has also gone away.

Tags: slackware