[ale] KVM switches

Robert Heaven robertheaven at earthlink.net
Fri Mar 26 13:31:56 EST 2004


I have a Belkin OmniCube 4-port KVM switch. (PS/2 only) When I first 
bought it, I had a wired keyboard and a wired 3-button ball mouse and 
everything worked great. Linux, Winblose, FreeBSD, they all worked fine.

Untill, however, I started playing around with wireless and optical 
devices. With a wireless keyboard, every time I changed the channel, I 
would have to unplug the keyboard connector and plug it back in. With an 
optical mouse, it doesn't matter if I have wired or wireless, every time 
I change the channel, I have to do the CTL+ALT+Backspace to kill X and 
restart it bacause the mouse protocol goes wacky.


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.
>  
>



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