Charles, Thanks, that's very interesting. Seems like they should have put the screws on the ps2 connectors instead of on the serial connectors. They're shallow plugs that come out very easily. I'm familiar with that keystroke trick with switching screens. I used to have to do that every time I started KDE until I went into the power management section, checked the box for Enable display power management, and then set Standby, Suspend and Power off to disabled. Now, I only have to do the key trick when I start mplayer. Greg Charles R. Anderson wrote:
On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 09:19:29PM -0400, Gregory Avedissian wrote:
Can anyone tell me if there's an advantage to plugging the mouse or the keyboard into usb rather than ps2?
USB was designed to be hot-swappable. PS/2 was not.
If you are lucky, your modern systems and peripherals may work after hotswapping PS/2. Otherwise, you may have problems with certain combinations of hardware and software. Linux/XFree86/Xorg-X11 is especially bad at handling PS/2 swapping.
If you are unlucky (mainly older hardware) you will fry your PS/2 controller if you attempt to hot-swap. Some "keyboard wedge" barcode scanning wands are notorious for this.
Most KVM switches will emulate an active interface to every computer's PS/2 ports that appears always connected to a keyboard/mouse, so the computer won't see them go away when the KVM is controlling a different PC. However, as there are several protocols a PS/2 mouse can speak, often a KVM will interfere by emulating the wrong thing. Sometimes one computer will reprogram the mouse and that will mess up its use on another computer after switching. I encounter this often. Usually Ctrl-Alt-F1 followed by Ctrl-Alt-F7 works to bring the mouse back to sanity in X11 after such a KVM input change, but not before the mouse has had a chance to randomly paste junk and click randomly all over my open applications.
Finally, some laptops and computers with laptop-style 3.3 volt PS/2 controller chips in them (e.g. most recent Dells) won't work with PS/2 extender cables or some KVM switches (e.g. Belkin). On mine I had to purchase a PS/2-keyboard/mouse-to-USB adapter to plug into my Dell USB port to allow the KVM switch to work.
PS/2 needs to die.
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