Installing 5.3-BETA7 without PS/2 keyboard

[Ryan Sommers]

Don Lewis wrote:

> This sounds a lot like what I ran into with my Athlon XP machine in the
>
>early days of 5.x.  I set up the machine to dual boot FreeBSD 5.x and
>RedHat Linux using GRUB to select the OS.  If I was using a USB keyboard
>and keyboard emulation was off, I couldn't interact with the loader, and
>I don't think I could interact with GRUB either.  If keyboard emulation
>was enabled, FreeBSD stumbled across atkbd and atkbdc and ignored the
>USB keyboard once it booted.  If I could get in over the network, I
>could use kbdcontrol to switch enable access to the USB keyboard.  This
>was sometimes a problem because neither the BIOS nor FreeBSD saw the fxp
>card when the machine was first powered on.  Letting the machine boot
>part way and hitting the reset button, or logging on and rebooting would
>cause fxp0 to appear, though the latter method could not be done
>remotely ...
>
>RedHat 7.3 automagically used the USB keyboard.
>
>These days I'm using the PS/2 ports via a KVM switch, so I have no idea
>if this is still a problem.
>  
>
I have somewhat the same problem. Although not too bad, I have a USB KVM 
which keeps me from interacting with the loader or boot manager, 
emulation or not. This isn't so bad since I can just move the keyboard 
to the machine's PS/2 port if I need to. Funny thing is on one of the 
machines it /used/ to work on 4.x (emulation) but since 5.x it hasn't.

Here's a me too looking forward to a keyboard multiplexor.

-- 
Ryan Sommers
ryans at gamersimpact.com