Hiho,
i have a weird problem with knoppix 3.6 (kernel 2.6). I was running into this problem because i got the same problem in debian sarge. when i tried to recompile my kernel with the new .config under debian i first got this problem. then tried out knoppix 3.6 and i got the same problem.
lets start from the beginning.
i tried to boot knoppix 3.6 with kernel 2.6. everything looked fine. it recognized 2 CPUs and boot up like normal. but when i was running kde i got no mouse and no keyboard.
i was trying the same under debian sarge. here i did not try X but tried to log into the shell. i did not have a keyboard there either. this always happened when using a kernel with smp support.
when i installed a kernel with no smp support my keyboard worked.
any ideas what this could be and how to solve it? under debian i solved it but i have no idea how i did it. i played around with the configuration and disabled a lot of modules i did not need.

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