I have 3 machines kicking around. One is a Dell Inspiron 530 from June 2008 that simply refuses to die. The others are more recent. On my desk (actually a re-purposed kitchen table) I only have room for 1 24 inch monitor, 1 big Unicomp "IBM-like clickety-clack" USB keyboard http://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_code=UNI041A and 1 trackball.
I got an IOGear 4-port USB KVM. It has a remote clicker to switch between the 4 ports; no icky escape/control sequences. Because it's hardware-controlled, there are no drivers required. It works great with one exception, which is a linux kernel problem, not a switch problem. The problem I've found occurs when booting a machine that is not currently selected by the KVM switch. I found the BIOS settings to eliminate the... Keyboard failure Select F1 to continue; F2 to enter SETUP ...message. The linux kernel problem is that it doesn't detect the display when that particular machine is not selected at bootup (duhhhh), and assumes 1024x768 console and graphics video. If the machine is selected by the switch at bootup, things work properly. But don't panic. Even if I boot into 1024x768 text mode, and default to 1024x768 graphics, running "xrandr -s 1920x1080" gets me 1920x1080 X Window display. The available modes for your display may be different. Just run "xrandr" for a list of available modes. -- Walter Dnes <[email protected]> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
