[NTLUG:Discuss] KVM for Linux

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2005 at 02:20:34PM -0600, 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.

Almost any KVM switch that doesn't require a (windows) software driver to 
be loaded should be able to work fine in a Linux environment.  I've used 
many such KVM switches in Linux environments without any real problems.

Well, I did have *one* problem:  one Belkin switch I had used the
"Scroll Lock" key as the trigger to switch between ports on the KVM
switch.  This was okay, except that pressing Scroll Lock could also 
temporarily suspend console messages, and when more than a buffer's worth of
console messages (probably 4K chars) were generated with scroll lock
activated, the result was a kernel panic.  The easy solution for this
KVM switch was to change the console keymaps to ignore Scroll Lock.  :-)

However, this was 5-6 years ago, and newer KVM switches likely don't
have this problem.

Pm