To fix this, follow the instructions provided in the 'slick2d' documentation
http://www.slick2d.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
This seems to be a real bug with slick2D/lwjgl on the versions that we are currently using. To fix this you can't use 64-bit java (with linux at least). Download the 32-bit java from Oracle web site and configure this to be your IDEs runtime environment (you may need to search for more help how to do this in your particular IDE)
This is purely related to permissions on linux. Go to '/dev/input' and change the folder permission 'sudo chmod 644 *' so that the process can simply read what's in there.
There didn't seem to be info on how to fix this problem whole together. Hope this helps some one else.