HELP! Cannot use mouse or keyboard any more

[sktsee]

On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 20:49:20 -0700, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

> I'm running Xubuntu, and have done for quite a while.  Right now it's at
> 14.04.   I just hosed it somehow, and when I reboot I cannot log in
> because the keyboard and mouse are being ignored.
> 
> It's not the hardware, because the grub menu works with the keyboard,
> and going to a recovery version of the kernel also works but it's
> console mode,
> not X.  But when I try a normal boot, the cursor stays in the middle of
> the desktop and the keyboard cannot enter my password.  I have to do a
> hard reset because 3-finger salute is also ignored.
> 
> The last thing I did was to change my nVidia settings by deleting one of
> my monitors.  That means X configuration, which also affects mouse and
> keyboard.  But I cannot find an xorg.conf file anywhere.

Actually, nvidia-settings usually doesn't touch /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It 
sets a per user X configuration in the users home directory, ~/.nvidia-
settings-rc. Boot into console mode and delete or rename ~/.nvidia-
settings-rc. And if you ever have run nvidia-settings as root (which you 
should not do), you should delete 
/root/.nvidia-settings-rc if it exists. 

> 
> Probably I just need to find out where the config settings are kept, and
> I can reset them from a backup.  Does anybody know?


These probably are the files you'd want examine.

~/.nvidia-settings-rc (also possibly in /root)
~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-desktop.xml and xfce4-
session.xml

I would try deleting the nvidia.settings-rc file first, though. 

-- 
sktsee