I just installed Ubuntu 11.04 and the laptop mousepad is not working, neither a USB mouse. What shall I do?

I have the same problem after upgrading a Dell Latitude d620 to Xubuntu 11.04 from prior Xubuntu release.

In my case, booting into recovery mode* and using the Repair Broken Packages menu it solved problem completely.

I believe the laptop went into suspend mode at some point in the installation. I stepped away from the machine and when I returned to it, it was displaying a black screen with insertion cursor and mouse cursor only. When I re-powered the machine, the mouse was hanging, and also language , keyboard layout and session selectors were not displaying.

If you think you might have similar situation, you could try to do repair broken packages as above or search forum for "dkpg configure -a" examples in distribution upgrade context.

(Press shift when powering on to get the Grub menu when powering on and select kernel marked as recovery mode)*

Dell Latitude D620. Basically, 'dpkg --configure -a' fixed all my problems. Just wanted to confirm the symptoms as described by the previous poster.

Detail: During the upgrade (10.10 -> 11.04), the installation just stopped and dropped to a text screen that was showing the 3 lines from this morning when I had opened the lid and resumed it from suspend. I wasn't watching at the instant that it did it, so I do not know if there was some message or warning. Once I noticed it, I left the laptop on, giving it quite some time to maybe finish what it was doing but there was no harddrive activity and the mouse had stopped working and the keyboard was unresponsive so I just turned it off. When I powered it back on, it showed a black screen for what felt like 60 seconds, but finally showed the standard login screen. My mouse didn't work. Using my keyboard, I logged in and it complained about my hardware not being good enough to run Unity, and brought up a lowres version of my Gnome desktop. NetworkManager didn't try to connect to any wireless networks. I tried a few different things rebooting about 5 times, but ultimately it was the dpkg command above that fixed everything. And I mean everything. Notably I didn't have to boot into rescue mode because I had enough usability to get a bash shell in a gnome-terminal and sudo (Alt-F1 -> Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal).