This is for interest only, it's not a current problem I have.
A couple of years or so ago I bought a s/hand Cube (G4, 400 Mhz IIRC). Great machine, beautifully designed. I was trying to use it with the monitor connected through an older Belkin KVM machine, an 'Omniview 4 Port PS/2' device. Obviously there were issues with the keyboard & mouse connection, but that's a different story.
What I found was that the Cube would refuse to start up unless the KVM switch was set to its channel. The Cube seemed to be testing for the presence of a monitor at the far end of the VGA lead and if it didn't find one it would refuse to start. And even if it started, if I then switched away from it I would generally find that it had frozen while it couldn't see the monitor.
This was a real problem as I had to use other machines (PCs) and only had space for one monitor. After a while I sold the Cube. More recently I've move my office and now have two monitors, one for three PCs, which I have to say all work perfectly well with the KVM switch, and the second one dedicated to a Powerbook, and connected directly into it. I haven't tried the Powerbook through the KVM switch, and I don't really need to.
Really, I'm just interested in this. Why would a Mac want to check the monitor status? Why not just start up and assume there's something out there? I queried all this at the time with someone and was got a reply 'this is happening because Macs are more intelligent than PCs', which on reflection I'm not too sure about - this is one instance where blind, stupid obedience to instructions (ie 'start up and push the video signal out through the VGA port') is exactly what's wanted! I think I was running an early version of OS X on the Cube (10.1.5?) or even MacOS 9, but in any case the refusal to start was occurring before the OS kicked in.
Any thoughts from anyone?
Tom Burke
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