Monday, August 31, 2009

I Found a Bug in Snow Leopard: Mac Keyboard and a KVM

So I upgraded early last week to Snow Leopard at work to complete testing of VMware Fusion 2.0.5 on Snow Leopard at work. If you use both, it works great (see the blog post), and I have been using Snow Leopard since.

I noticed really quickly an interesting bug between Snow Leopard and my KVM at work. For those of you who don't already know, a KVM is a device that allows you to share a monitor and keyboard & mouse between multiple computers (the one I have serves up to four) so that you don't need to have 4 monitors and 4 keyboard and 4 mice on your desk. It's pretty cool and useful.

Anyways, in order to simplify things, you always connect your mouse and keyboard to this device. OSX does a great job of detecting the keyboard to figure out which key layout it is. In Leopard, this setup worked fine, and the keyboard was connected perfectly. When I connected it the same setup to Snow Leopard, my keyboard was detected as an older keyboard. This doesn't seem like it would be a huge problem, but before Apple created the new thin keyboard, the function keys were in different spots. The volume control and eject button were over the number pad; Dashboard and Expose were setup around the F8 key, though without any images. There were no play or pause buttons then either.

When I connect my keyboard directly to my Mac Pro, it is detected correctly. However, when I connect it to the KVM, it detects it incorrectly. Initially I thought the computer detected my keyboard as the old one since the dashboard and expose buttons were over the F8ish function keys, but I later realized that the volume control was not over the number pad as it had been in the past. In fact, I have been completely unable to find the volume control anywhere on the keyboard.

I'm assuming this is a bug in Snow Leopard with the connection to the KVM since this did not happen at all on Leopard. Obviously I am not sure exactly what is causing the problem, but it's really annoying and I'm hoping it is fixed sooner rather than later.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

im having a problem with the mac OS 10.6 (snow leapard) with a KVM too.
the mouse from the KVM moves faster then the mouse that is directly connected to the mac.
the problem is that i have a touchscreen connected to the KVM as the mouse - so, due to the faster mouse on the KVM the touch screen is not responding properly.
after collaborating the touchscreen, the finger and the mouse pointer meet at the center of the screen, but as i move my finger to any of the sides the mouse pointer drifts farther then the finger.
the KVM is mac compatible, works perfectly with the previous mac OS's and with windows based PCs....

Post a Comment

Related Posts with Thumbnails