installation with a usb keyboard

Geoff S. Garen Geoff.S.Garen at Dartmouth.EDU
Sat Dec 27 10:35:27 PST 2003


I'm trying to install FreeBSD 4.9-stable with a usb keyboard. At the initial installation prompt (press enter to boot...), my keyboard works. I can even pause the boot loader to call up a command prompt. However, once the installation kernel boots, my keyboard doesn't work anymore.

Is there a fix to this?

>From reading stuff on the web, I've discovered two suggestions:

(1) Use a PS/2 keyboard for installation - your USB keyboard will work when installation is finished.

This doesn't help me because my computer has only USB ports.

(2) Enable "legacy / AT keyboard emulation" in BIOS.

This doesn't help me because I don't have that option in BIOS. More importantly, it seems to be on by default, which explains my ability to use the keyboard at the initial prompt. However, according to some older posts, it turns off by default once the FreeBSD kernel loads, because the kernel recognizes USB devices, so the BIOS senses that AT emulation isn't necessary. This seems like a supreme irony: because FreeBSD supports USB devices, my USB device doesn't work.

The last posts on this topic were March 2002. Has anything happened since then? Does anyone know a work-around? If FreeBSD supports USB devices, why doesn't it support them during installation?

Any help much appreciated.

Geoff Garen


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