Keyboard not recognized

Hello you all,

I am new to NixOS, and am trying to install it on top of ZFS for my daily driver.

The issue I am facing is that during the boot I am not able to enter my password for the zfs pool. I believe my main keyboard is not recognized because even something like ctrl+alt+del has no effect. However, another generic keyboard works without issues.

For your info, I am using an Apple Extended II keyboard with an ADB to USB converter (iMate) which worked without issues under other linux distributions.

I have tried searching for a solution by browsing GitHub issues, plenty of blog posts, and in contacting people on the Matrix - all to no avail, so I am hoping to find help here.

Moreover, I tried adding an aboundance of different kernel modules to my initrd.availableKernelModules, since I suspected the cause is a missing module.

To clarify even further, the nix configuration I tried is the default configuration generated by nixos-generate-config (following the zfs installation guide on the nix wiki). The only thing I changed is setting networking.hostId because the zfs configuration enforces it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I would appreciate any help in solving this issue for future people to come. :slight_smile:

I was finally able to fix it by appending evdev to boot.initrd.availableKernelModules and setting boot.initrd.systemd.enable to true. I have no clue why that fixes things.

Genuinely hope this workaround helps someone, so they do not need to waste hours like myself.

Final configuration (in my case):

boot.initrd.availableKernelModules: ahci sd_mod sr_mod usbhid xhci_hcd evdev
boot.initrd.systemd.enable: true

Cheers

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I was just about to suggest adding evdev :slight_smile:

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