I am a longtime user of Gentoo Linux. I've had my Gentoo system running on my desktop tower for years.
... until one day when my SSD busted and lost all my data.
After compiling and installing everything -- including the kernel, bootloader, KDE, all on encrypted root filesystem -- ran it just fine.
I still had a few packages to build, and the kernel configuration to adjust.
A system restart was needed, obviously.
So restart the system I did. To my surprise, the system stopped at the login screen of display manager. Neither the mouse nor the keyboard responded.
Seems the problem was with the graphic interface, so the best course of action was to disabled the display manager on the startup. Since I couldn't do anything with the non-responsive display manager, Gentoo's LiveUSB was used.
So I manually unlocked the encrypted filesystem, mounted it, and chrooted there. After disabling the display manager, I rebooted to my system.
The terminal still accepted the keyboard input. No idea about the mouse since the terminal doesn't use one, but I assumed it worked as well.
I went around and changed the kernel setting again, to no avail. I even tried updating the system, and later rebuilding the whole system from zero! Thankfully, I kept the backup of kernel configuration that worked fine.
When I finished rebuilding and got to the point where I left off, I decided to play safe and archive the whole system as a backup.
I followed my intuition that it was the kernel setting after all. I went thru the menuconfig to see if I missed anything. I found that the evdev (event device) driver is disabled (accidentally, perhaps?) on the kernel setting. Enabling it solved the issue!
It was concluded that the problem was because a required driver wasn't enabled. As I'm writing this now, my Gentoo system is running just fine!
Moral of the story: evdev driver is important for your graphic interface, folks! Also, back up your data!
