[NTLUG:Discuss] KVM for Linux

[Chris Cox]

Fred James wrote:
> All
> I have a situation that could be an excellent place to use a small KVM 
> switch, but I am not able (as yet) to determine if such would work in a 
> purely Linux environment.  Does anyone have any experience or advise 
> they could share?  Thank you in advance for any help you may be able to 
> offer.
> Regards
> Fred James
> 

My own experience is that they all pretty much work.  I don't like
Belkin's use of Scroll Lock for soft switching since you have to hit
it twice and it can cause application problems with the scroll lock
activated unknowingly.

All KVMs (my experience) will occasionally (if not all the time) suffer
synchronization loss on the mouse device (causes the mouse to jump
around all over the place).  You can somewhat mitigate this in
Linux by supplying psmouse.proto=imps or psmouse.proto=raw on
the kernel boot line.  But all is not Linux... so this might
help somewhat but it's not fullproof.

Older Linux distributions (2.4 kernel), when they lose sync, you
can switch to a vc (Ctrl-Alt-F1 for instance) and the back to
the X11 vc (Alt-F7) and the mouse will be resync'd.

Worst case, you may have to disconnect the mouse from the KVM
and plug it back in.  Especially true of PS2 to USB converters
on a PS2 KVM.

If Windows loses synch, it usually will recover, but if doesn't
you're just hosed... have to reboot it.