Re: Installing 5.3-BETA7 without PS/2 keyboard

From: Don Lewis <truckman_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 22:06:48 -0700 (PDT)
On  7 Oct, Brooks Davis wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 12:12:22AM -0400, Rajappa Iyer wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I hope someone can help me out here.  I have a machine with
>> no PS/2 connectors... so I only have USB keyboard.  I have turned
>> on the BIOS emulation of keyboard -- the boot loader seems to see
>> it fine.  But once FreeBSD boots, then it is no longer able to
>> see the keyboard.
>> 
>> I tried disabling the atkbd and atkbdc, but it still finds and
>> attaches kbd0 to atkbd and kbd1 to the USB keyboard.
>> 
>> Any way out of this situation?
> 
> Sounds like your BIOS is too smart for it's own good.  It emulates
> enough of the keyboard for atkbd to to probe, but then ukbd finds the
> keyboard and breaks it.  Does the same thing happen if you disable
> emulation?  (I suspect it does).  If so, you may need to install by
> sticking the disk in something else and installing there.  One other
> idea, if you can disable ukbd that may keep the keyboard from being
> initalized which should keep the emulation work.

This sounds a lot like what I ran into with my Athlon XP machine in the
early days of 5.x.  I set up the machine to dual boot FreeBSD 5.x and
RedHat Linux using GRUB to select the OS.  If I was using a USB keyboard
and keyboard emulation was off, I couldn't interact with the loader, and
I don't think I could interact with GRUB either.  If keyboard emulation
was enabled, FreeBSD stumbled across atkbd and atkbdc and ignored the
USB keyboard once it booted.  If I could get in over the network, I
could use kbdcontrol to switch enable access to the USB keyboard.  This
was sometimes a problem because neither the BIOS nor FreeBSD saw the fxp
card when the machine was first powered on.  Letting the machine boot
part way and hitting the reset button, or logging on and rebooting would
cause fxp0 to appear, though the latter method could not be done
remotely ...

RedHat 7.3 automagically used the USB keyboard.

These days I'm using the PS/2 ports via a KVM switch, so I have no idea
if this is still a problem.
Received on Fri Oct 08 2004 - 03:06:57 UTC

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