USB keyboard and KVM

Scott Saunders scrotch at sprynet.com
Tue Jun 10 09:26:30 PDT 2003


I'm working on my very first FreeBSD machine running FreeBSD 
4.8-RELEASE. I've worked with many Macs and toyed with Linux, and I'm 
finding FreeBSD very nice.

I have one issue I haven't been able to figure out yet. I'm using a USB 
keyboard with a USB KVM switch. When the machine boots, the keyboard is 
recognized and works fine. (The keyboard doesn't seem to have any 
effect at the "Hit [enter] to boot immediately..." line of startup, 
though.) However, if I switch the KVM to another computer and back, the 
machine doesn't respond to the keyboard. The monitor comes back fine, 
but the keyboard and mouse don't seem to do anything. I can log in via 
SSH, but I would like to turn SSH off and just use the KVM set up.

I'm only using the CLI, so the mouse isn't an issue for me. This is my 
first FreeBSD install, and also my first PC hardware and I'm at a loss. 
If someone could point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate 
it.

I have:
usbd_enable="YES"
blanktime="0"
at the end of rc.conf.

I added:
kbdcontrol -k /dev/kbd0 < /dev/ttyv0 > /dev/null
to the end of /etc/rc.i386 based on the FAQ.

I added:
options KBD_INSTALL_CDEV
to the kernel config and recompiled, based on my interpretation of the 
ukbd man page.

Many thanks,
Scott Saunders



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