Keyboard and Mouse Unresponsive in GDM

A fairly major upgrade of Xorg at the weekend left my Gentoo Linux box in a state where mouse and keyboard input no longer worked at the GDM login screen.

Nasty.

First port of call was /var/log/Xorg.0.log, in which I could see some suspicious lines:

(II) LoadModule: "mouse"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input//mouse_drv.so
(II) Module mouse: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 1.5.3, module version = 1.4.0
        Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
        ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 2.1
(EE) module ABI major version (2) doesn't match the server's version (4)
(II) UnloadModule: "mouse"
(II) Unloading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input//mouse_drv.so
(EE) Failed to load module "mouse" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
(EE) No input driver matching `mouse'
(II) LoadModule: "kbd"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input//kbd_drv.so
(II) Module kbd: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 1.5.3, module version = 1.3.2
        Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
        ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 2.1
(EE) module ABI major version (2) doesn't match the server's version (4)
(II) UnloadModule: "kbd"
(II) Unloading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input//kbd_drv.so
(EE) Failed to load module "kbd" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
(EE) No input driver matching `kbd'

So, a version mismatch between driver modules and the updated X server.

The solution?

emerge -1 x11-drivers/xf86-input-{evdev,keyboard,mouse}

Followed by:

/etc/init.d/xdm restart

The downside? The keyboard wasn't working. So I had to issue these commands from my Macbook Pro after sshing into my Linux box.

If you're stuck without ssh access, hold down Alt-SysRq and then press r and then e to kill the X server, then Alt-Shift-F1 to get back to a virtual terminal, and then log in as root. Not pretty, but I'd guess that it'd work.