Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000 keyboard & mouse not responding

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Date: 25 Nov 2003 13:50:05 -0800

Hi. I have reason to believe that I made a very big
and costly mistake. If I sound vague in my description
of the problem then the reason for that is I really
don't understand what the problem is. I've never
experienced something like this on a laptop before.
I'm going by memory here so the commands and file
contents I list might not be completely accurate so I
apologize for any confusion beforehand. I can't access
the laptop anymore to verify =(

I was using SuSE 8.2 on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000
with great success. The only problem was that the lcd
brightness was really overbearing and straining my
eyes. I asked for help on undernet in a linux support
IRC channel and was told to do the following:
% modprobe toshiba_acpi

That command worked. Then I edited the following file
/proc/acpi/toshiba/lcd

The file had two lines. I don't remember the exact
name of the second variable.
Brightness: 7
Maximumbrightness: 8

I changed the first line "Brightness: 7" to 4. That
worked too and I used that for a couple days. In fact
for several days without any problems whatsoever. Then
one day after changing the value to 4, I changed it to
2. That dimmed the lcd a bit more and I proceeded to
do some work when after a few seconds or minutes the
laptop locked up. Windowmaker, X, the keyboard or
mouse were not responding. I powered down the laptop
using the on/off button. When I powered it back up the
grub bootloader screen was displayed but the keyboard
was not responding. It selected the default boot
selection after the timeout period and booted Windows
2000 where the keyboard and mouse were not working. I
plugged in a USB mouse and then I could use the mouse
that way. Still no keyboard. I'm going to buy a USB
keyboard to test if that works.

When this laptop boots up it is possible to type F12
before the grub boot menu loads. Doing that gives the
option to boot from cdrom, floppy, hard drive, network.
I can type F12 but after that it won't let me choose
anything else. Same thing if I try to go to the BIOS.
If I type ESC before grub loads it says:
"Check system and then press F1 to enter BIOS". Usually
typing F1 after that message would let me configure the
bios but it won't respond if I type F1 after ESC.

This is where it gets even more weird. Once in a blue
moon the keyboard and onboard mouse work and I am able
to boot into either Windows or Linux and issue commands.
But only for a few minutes after which the keyboard &
mouse stop responding again. When this happened I was
able to boot from CD and flashed the bios[1] hoping that
would solve the problem but it didn't. I might be
speculating since the laptop isn't usable for long
periods of time but I think the fan isn't working
perfectly either. It turns on sometimes but other times
it feels like the laptop is getting too hot so I turn it
off quickly.

Can someone who is familiar with this laptop or has
general knowledge about linux on laptop please give me
some insight as to what is taking place? If I have made
a big mistake then I would like to know what so I can
learn from it. Thank you for reading this long post.

[1]This is the bios utility I used:
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_dtlViewDL.jsp?soid=495595&moid=135844&BV_SessionID=@@@@0639729444.1069796000@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccccadcjmjiheelcgfkceghdgngdgll.0&ct=DL

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