No Keyboard, No Mouse after upgrading Fedora 20 to Fedora 22

In the crazy world of Linux based operating systems, know this: Not all upgrades are created equal.

Back in November, I upgraded my personal laptop to Fedora 23 from Fedora 22 using dnf and I had almost nothing to report since the process was quite smooth and uneventful. However, my workstation at the office was still running Fedora 20, so I figured it was time to upgrade and bring that machine up to date.  The original plan was to perform the upgrade in 2 stages: first, upgrade Fedora 20 to Fedora 22 using the old FedUp script, and once I could confirm that the system  was stable, I would then step up the upgrade from Fedora 22 to Fedora 23 using the new dnf method.

Obviously as the title of this post suggests, things didn’t go quite as planned.

Just a routine upgrade

First off, I prepped and upgraded my system for the upgrade to Fedora 22 like so:

sudo yum update
sudo yum install fedup
sudo fedup --network 22

After downloading all of the new packages without error, I rebooted and selected System Upgrade (FedUp) from the boot menu (GRUB in my case).

Once again, the upgrade was (seemingly) uneventful, except when it was time to login and I found that the keyboard or mouse did not work. The keyboard wasn’t frozen either which was evident when toggling the Caps Lock or Num Lock keys. So, it was off to the internet to find out what the problem was.

An obscure bug is found…but there’s a solution

Turns out, it’s related to a bug where Xorg fails to start, resulting in loss of keyboard and mouse functionality. This is related to /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.freedesktop.login1.conf. Here are the full details on the bug in question.

My solution, although lengthy, did the trick and got me back to a functioning keyboard (workstation).

1. Booted the system to the command prompt (init 3)
2. Upgraded all of the packages.

I didn’t want to run a full release upgrade to Fedora 23 just yet, so I upgraded all of the rpms like so:

sudo dnf upgrade

After the upgrade of all relevant rpms and a subsequent reboot, the mouse and keyboard were responsive once again.