Sometimes it is hard to believe that in this crazy world someone can need a product that doesn’t exist. It’s even harder when it is quite obvious that we possess the technology and the means to create such a product. Well, today is the day. To my absolute shock and amazement I cannot find a computer product to fit my needs.
What I need is a device which will allow me to switch at least two USB devices between at least 3 computers. It has to support USB 2.0 and it has to be OS independent. I found some solutions that required windows software to control the switching, that is no good.
Let me explain my situation a little better in case anyone has a better solution. You see I have two monitors that both take a DVI or VGA input. There is a single button on each monitor to allow me to switch between DVI or VGA. As one of my computers uses dual screens and the rest use single this basically means I have a 3 port video switch built into my monitors. So a KVM isn’t really necessary. A KVM might be nice as it would help if I got more than 3 computers. While I foresee that, I don’t foresee it in the near future.
My keyboard is the Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2 USB. My mouse is the Logitech MX1000. I thought for a minute that I would be all slick and plug the MX1000 into the USB hub in the keyboard. Then I would just need a 3+x1 USB switch, which is easy to find and cheap. NO such luck. The mouse does not work properly when it is plugged into the keyboard. I mean, it really wants to work, but sometimes it just stops working. And it definitely happens too often to be useful. Whichever solution I get can has to be MX1000 compatible. I have no worries about the keyboard working.
So search on Google, Newegg and any other site you can think of. I promise you, finding a solution to my problem is not easy. Everything you find will either be too small or too big. There might be a product hidden somewhere that I have yet to find. But well, that’s the reason I’m writing this post isn’t it?
Last, but not least, there is a problem when hot swapping the MX1000 using evdev. I basically have to restart X all the time. Ubuntu doesn’t have this problem, but they use ImPS/2. I hear that in the newer Xorgs this is fixed, can anyone confirm/deny? Thanks.
