2 keyboards, 2 mice, 2 monitors with 1 PC; possible?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 13 October 2005 at 14:21:44 -0700, Rob wrote:
>
> I'm using 5-Stable right now.
>
> I wonder if FreeBSD allows me to have two independent users working
> on the same PC, by using two monitors, two keyboards and two mice,
> all connected to a single PC.
>
> xorg supports dual-head, which could be
> a starting point.
>
> But how about the keyboards and mice?
> Should that be one keyboard/mouse pair as PS/2,
> and a second pair as USB? How would that
> be detected and controlled?
>
> Is such a setup supported by the FreeBSD kernel?
> Has someone tried this?

I've certainly used multiple monitors, multiple mice and a single
keyboard in a single user environment, and that works fine.  I've also
run multiple X servers on the same machine.  X configuration allows
you to specify which device to use.  The only part I'm hazy about is
how to map the keyboard definition to hardware devices.  Looking at
/dev, however, I see:

  crw-------  1 root  wheel    3,  63 Sep 11 15:52 /dev/kbd0
  crw-------  1 root  wheel    3,  31 Sep 11 15:52 /dev/sysmouse

I just tried plugging in a USB keyboard and got this:

  crw-------  1 root  wheel    3,  63 Sep 11 15:52 /dev/kbd0
  crw-------  1 root  wheel    3, 195 Sep 11 15:52 /dev/kbd1
  crw-------  1 root  wheel    3,  31 Sep 11 15:52 /dev/sysmouse

(yes, the date *must* be wrong).  This looks very promising, but as
long as it was plugged in, X only responded to /dev/kbd1.  When I
disconnected it, /dev/kbd0 responded again.  So possibly there's some
issue with the keyboard mapping.

Greg
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