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

Rob spamrefuse at yahoo.com
Thu Oct 13 19:11:38 PDT 2005



--- Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> 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.

Thanks so much for the helpful response.
Sounds good indeed, though I myself have to dig a
bit deeper into the technical and configurational
aspects of all this.
I asked here first, because I wanted to avoid to
run against the impossible when I will be trying
to understand and actually do these kind of things.

When googled on this issue, I got only Linux
related sites . The main issue there appears to
be that the standard kernel can only handle one
single keyboard. A not-so-trivial hack to the
Linux kernel is needed for two keyboards....

Does your observation above tell me that the
standard FreeBSD kernel (as of 5-Stable) is
already capable of handling more than one
keyboard?

Regards,
Rob.



		
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