[ale] KVM switches

Josh Freeman josh at catea.org
Fri Mar 26 10:52:01 EST 2004


I've had a couple. I had a belkin PS/2 KVM swtich, and now I have a
MiniView USB KVM switch. All the switching is done in the box, so the
switch is pretty much OS-agnostic. Both work very well.

the only problem I have seen is with USB, because some bioses get
confused by the KVM switch being between the cpu and the keyboard. I
just unplug the keyboard on boot, and plug back in once I get to grub.
Considering how rarely I reboot, this isn't an issue for me.

Josh




On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 10:36, Trey Sizemore wrote:
> I know there was some discussion on this a while back, but I can't for
> the life of me find them or remember which month(s) they occured in the
> archives.  I've got 3 machines (p200, p2 400, and a p4 2.8GHz) that I
> would like to share keyboard, mouse, video (hence the KVM switch ;-))
> 
> I've not used one of these before, so I just wanted to know what to look
> for and what to look out for.  My current keyboard is PS/2, mouse is USB.
>  My P4 has both ports as does the P2.  The older Pentium 200 is socked
> away, so I can't remember if it has USB or not.  Should I get a KVM
> switch with PS/2 then, just to be safe?  I have the USB to PS/2 adapter
> that came with the mouse.
> 
> Also, is the switching done by hardware or software (and if software, are
> Linux systems supported well?)?
> 
> Thanks for the feedback.
-- 
Josh Freeman
Technical Manager
Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access



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