I have a Dell 7390 Laptop that causes some issues. The keyboard driver is often crashing. After shutdown and restart everything is working fine again. Restart or logout/login does not help.
It is mostly related to the change of power supply. When I’m on battery and plug in the power cable to recharge, the KB is gone. Same when battery level goes low. Hibernation is sometimes an issue but not always.
I am on 20.04. Had the same with 18.04. Complete reinstallation does not help. I appreciate any help. Thank you!!!
Hello and welcome.
Honestly I can’t think of any logical correlation between keyboard and power (battery / AC)…
Has the keyboard backlight? If so, maybe you could deactivate it and see if that helps.
Another test I would do is booting up with another live distro, preferably not Ubuntu. Maybe try Fedora or openSUSE. Just to verify if it’s a distro-related problem.
I found this (rather old) thread. Not exactly the same problem, but worth a read.
You didn’t mention, if only the keyboard is not responding. Is the mouse/touchpad OK?
Have you tried to attach an external keyboard to the notebook?
Maybe a look at the logs would bring a clue…
You can open a terminal window, fire the command tail -f /var/log/syslog
and then plug the power source.
The command shows the system logfile in realtime. Maybe it comes up with something useful.
I had a truckload of issues with a Dell Latitude 7xxx series laptop… I thought it was software or something, until I fired up the quasi GUI bios (clickety click click) and same symptoms…
The laptop works fine for hours, then suddenly the cursor and keyboard go haywire… like it’s possessed by a demon… basically gave up using it mostly… I bought a whole new palm rest keyboard assembly, but put that job in the too hard basket about x years ago (some time before the pandemic), kinda like when I put aside, into the too hard (more like “can’t be arsed”) basket, replacing the inner primary gasket on my Harley Davidson, around 2018… Symptom tends to happen more often in summer, hence chassis heat looks like the likely culprit…
My computer once crashed completely and I had to unplug the battery.
During this operation I unplugged and replugged the keyboard from/to the board. That was it. I guess a bit of dust must have covered socket or plug. Interestingly I did not have this issue with Win10.