How to solve a problem with keyboard and touchpad in Dell Vostro 1510 with Ubuntu 9.04

I’ve installed Ubuntu 9.04 on Dell Vostro 1510 and the installation was completed with no error. But I’ve experienced a strange behavior: every time I turned my laptop on, the keyboard and touchpad didn’t work. Making some tests I’ve discovered that if I reboot the laptop the keyboard and touchpad starts working normally. But to reboot you will need plug an external USB mouse. As expected, this also happens with Xubuntu 9.04.

An important detail: the laptop keyboard works normally in Grub menu but something during the first boot cause this problem and on second boot this problem go away. Strange  =)

“Solution”

I’ve searched on Internet and found a partial solution: boot the kernel passing i8042.reset as parameter. This works perfectly, but I consider as a partial solution because every time you upgrade a kernel through Update Manager, you will loose this modification.

Let’s go: Edit menu.lst file located in /boot/grub/ as root (or with sudo command) and be careful. It’s highly recommended make a backup copy. Go around line number 130 (here is line 135) and you will find the kernel line. Go to the end of this line and add “i8042.reset” (without quotes). Look my partial menu.lst file.