2009 MacBook Pro 17 - keyboard just stops and never comes back

[kellis5137]

Hi all,
I got a 2009 MacBook Pro 17, I believe it's a Mac 5,2?! Anyways, I've tried installing Ubuntu and now LM, and LM definitely seems to be working better. However, the same thing happened with both. I boot to the Live CD. With LM, in particular, it was working real well, even found my wifi. Anyways, I perform an installation and everything goes perfectly. Reboot and, initially, I can log in and start configuring stuff in the initial start-up screen.

Then all of a sudden, the keyboard stops. The mouse still moves, but not all the clicks register. Weirder still, I can see the cursor react when I hit a key, but no characters produce. I have to force a reboot. I can use the keys in grub, but when I get to the Mint log-in screen, I can't type anything. Once again, the mouse works some in terms of clicks, I can see the cursor in the "Password" field react when I type, but no characters. Furthermore, if I open the on-screen keyboard, the same thing as with the real thing. I can see the keys getting clicked, the cursor reacts, but nothing is produced. I've also connected a real keyboard... the same thing.

Everything looks beautiful and when it's working, it's working perfectly... but it only last for about a minute after booting the first time to do. OH, and if I boot to the live USB again, it works fine?! Thoughts?

Keith

[Reddog1]

I've installed Mint on a number of Apples, but not that particular one. At least some of those macbooks (maybe all of the 2009 ones) had an Nvidia gpu. The Nouveau driver might not be functioning properly at the native resolution for the Apple Nvidia card (cards in Apples had some differences from the 'standard' card). The reason that everything works from live usb is probably that the video card is running in 'nomodeset' (compatibility mode) in live. You can either install the Nvidia driver from the Driver Manager or edit /etc/default/grub to add the nomodeset to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. The latter method won't get you native screen resolution. Some early drivers have been deprecated since Mint 19.3, but I don't know if support for old Nvidia cards was removed from nouveau.