I recently updated my keyboard and for the first time have one that plugs into USB. It works fine, WindowsXP required driver installation but Linux just worked. However I had one problem.
As you may gather this is a multi-boot machine, it has Windows and a couple of versions of Linux. I have a Grub menu at boot up to select the OS to use. That was the problem, the keyboard wouldn’t work until an OS started up. I could only access my default OS. Checking a couple of forums I found a comment that some (most new) bios have an option to activate USB at boot. I checked mine (using an old ps2 keyboard) and the option was already set. Still no luck.
My computer has 2 set of USB ports (3 if you count the ones on the front panel). There are some directly on the motherboard and some on an expansion card. I had plugged the keyboard into the expansion card. As a test I rearranged some of my USB devices plugging the keyboard into one of the ports on the motherboard and rebooted. Problem solved, it worked fine.
As an aside both Linux systems handled the rearrangement without a problem however Windows went into a flap trying to set up all my “new” hardware and insisted on a reboot before it would work. That’s one reason why it isn’t my default OS!
Techodyssey 