OpenBSD and Inspiron 1501

I recently reinstalled OpenBSD on my laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1501.

The installation went smoothly and everything was working fine; except the keyboard. The laptop was beeping when xdm was started. The beeps stopped after logging-in. Also the keyboard was not working well, the key-repeat was behaving strangely. It was working for the first 3 or 4 characters then got stuck. It was annoying to type; especially to delete chunks of text with backspace.

I had this problem for a while and was not able to find anything on the net regarding this issue. I guess GNU/Linux and the others BSD's are also affected.

The solution is simply to update the BIOS to the latest version (2.6.3).

The BIOS update was painful and requires Microsoft Windows which was major problem since It was not installed on the laptop.

If my writing sparked any ideas, questions, or insights, I would love to hear from you.
Email me at henry@precheur.org I read and respond to each email.