Brand-new Asus A16 laptop, specific model FA617NS. I wanted to install Slackware64 15.0 and had an appallingly bad experience with it. Press a key, wait five minutes. Press another, wait some more. As a test I grabbed an OpenSUSE Leap ISO and wrote it to a USB stick. The keyboard did not work at that point, so I started trying some things.

Dropping back to Slackware64 14.2 did not change matters.

The -current ISO I found on-line didn't work either. I am currently writing a newly created -current ISO to a USB stick for another try.

I got to thinking about the keyboard, so I grabbed a USB keyboard and plugged it in. And it worked at least two orders of magnitude better than it did before. I was able to select a keyboard map and log in as root, which was more than I could do from the laptop's keyboard.

Is there a kernel option I can use to use the USB keyboard driver, either in the updated 15.0 kernel or in the -current kernel? As another approach, is there a way to disable UEFI on the laptop and go straight legacy?

I talked with ASUS' tech support asking if there was a known issue with the Linux kernel and the built-in keyboard. Reinstalling the Windows driver didn't help with a Linux issue.

Imagine that.

It may take me a few days to get back to this as my plate is a little full right now.

There is an old bug report here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217336
The fix is not yet in 15.0 patches, but I thought the fix would have been backported to the kernel slackware current has.

There was another thread in LQ: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...el-4175726768/

1 members found this post helpful.

There is an old bug report here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217336
The fix is not yet in 15.0 patches, but I thought the fix would have been backported to the kernel slackware current has.

There was another thread in LQ: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...el-4175726768/

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you very much, Petri. It looks like that may well be exactly what I am looking for.

Off to build a 6.4.7 kernel sooner or later, probably later. I'll update once I've tried that kernel.

Like I said earlier, a *lot* on my plate. I didn't forget -- honest.

I am running slackware-current on he laptop now. It solved the keyboard problem in one swell foop. Which led to the exposure of another problem.

I could boot and run using a USB stick, but I deemed that as a suboptimum solution. I noted I didn't get any kind of elilo configuration options when I installed, unlike when I installed the pre-15.0 current for another new machine, so I tried reinstalling slackware64/a/elilo-3.16-x86_64-16.txz but it didn't change anything for either good or ill. I tried this, tried that, and tried the other, but I wasn't able to access eliloconfig through the command line, which, or locate. As my next (and, as it turned out, my last) attempt at solving this problem I copied the directory slackware64/a/elilo to /root and rebuilt the package. I reinstalled it, called eliloconfig, and saw the elilo configuration prompts. It works now. I can boot Slackware from a cold start without the USB stick. It takes a little tinkering to get it to boot Windows, but that's okay.

I did get the MD5 checksums from the released package as well as the rebuilt one
here they are:

A caveat: I only dug deep enough to find the what. I didn't go looking for the why.

I tip my cap to all that aided me in this endeavor and can now declare it "solved". Thanks to all.