My experiences with ps2 keyboards show that they will send the 'scanset 2'
keycodes from powerup - ie without any initialistaion.

Thus if you just assume there is a keyboard attached to the keyboard
port at boot time everything will be fine.  However netBSD seems (from
these email comments) to want the 'grope' the keyboard at boot time.
If the grope fails it doesn't attach the device (to wscons).

Is the default action of wscons to treat multiple keyboards as a single
data stream? Or to assume there will be two monitors and two users?

On the other hand I didn't get mice to generate co-ordinates unless
they were initialised (I think - was nearly 3 years ago...).

    David

Subject: Re: Keyboard difficulties


> On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 11:07:23PM +0100, Jochen Kunz wrote:
> > On 2001.12.05 19:51 Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> > 
> > > It's not completely clear that the hardware supports this. 
> > The Hardware does not support it. But as practice shows it works
> > nevertheless. Remember those cheap keyboard/mouse/monitor multiswitches
> > to connect two or four machines to a single keyboard/mouse/monitor
> > set...
> 
> Yes, I know this, I have some. Some of my NetBSD machine can recover from
> booting without keyboard without troubles, some don't. It seems completely
> dependant on the motherboard.
> 
> > 
> > > I've seen PCs where it would be impossible to get the keyboard 
> > > working for the BIOS if it wasn't pluged at boot time
> > I found that it is often no problem to connect the keyboard when the OS
> > is already booted. Except NetBSD, that strictly refuses to recognize the
> > keyboard. 
> 
> It depends on hardware. I have machines where it is working fine,
> even if plugged after boot.
> 
> --
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
> --