Usb keyboard problems with a Dell Precision 380

[Bill Paul]

[Charset ISO-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> Hi.
> 
> I have sent this e-mail to the hardware and usb lists without any 
> result. Please, can you help me?
> 
> First, i will apologize about my bad english... sorry...
> 
> I'm trying to install FreeBSD 6.0-Release into a Dell Precision 380
> workstation. The machine has an usb keyboard.
> I try with the "usb keyboard" from menu boot, also setting this "set
> hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x1"" from "options" in the menu boot option, or
> also with "set hint.acpi.0.disabled="1""... Is impossible to obtain
> keyboard when i arrive to sysinstall menu. Sometimes the machine hangup
> when arrive to "atkb" or keyboard section in the kernel load.
> Really, I can't understand what's happen...
> If a try with a FreeBSD 5.3 (Freesbie 1.1 livecd) all run ok.

What I think you really want to try is: set hint.atkbd.0.disabled="1"
(You said "set hint.acpi.0.disable="1"" but that's not the same
thing. You do _not_ want to disable ACPI. You _do_ want to disable
the atkbd device.)

It happens I just did an install on the machine in my office, and
even if I select the "boot with USB keyboard" option from the boot
menu, sysinstall _still_ uses the PS/2 keyboard. (Luckily, in my case,
I have both the USB and PS/2 keyboard: the system is designed to use
the PS/2 keyboard by default, and I added a USB keyboard and mouse
later.) I think the problem is that as long as atkbd0 is detected
(and FreeBSD/i386 steadfastly insists on detecting it even on some
systems where there really isn't a PS/2 keyboard), it will default
to using kdb0 attached to atkbd0, and the only way to change it is to
run kbdcontrol later. But sysinstall does not run kbdcontrol.

Disabling atkbd0 forces the USB keyboard to become kbd0. Then it
works. In my case, hint.atkbd.0.disable="1" did the trick. I hope it
works for you.

-Bill

--
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-Bill Paul            (510) 749-2329 | Senior Engineer, Master of Unix-Fu
                 wpaul at windriver.com | Wind River Systems
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              <adamw> you're just BEGGING to face the moose
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