Well, after a week of waiting, my KVM came. This is the model I bought. It features rack mounts, 8 ports, hot key switching, manual switching, keyboard/mouse/monitor reset without power down, and auto scan.

After spending an hour and a half rewiring my room to get one extra plug, I discovered I had an empty plug right next to where I wanted the KVM…so I ended up unrewiring. So now I had it installed and I was dying to test it out. So I hooked devnulled(this server) and sputneek(my athlon64 gaming box) to the kvm. The keyboard I used was a Logitech Cordless Desktop Express.

After powering on the KVM it auto scanned for connected computers and changed the light color for the port to green. Since I was testing it on sputneek first, I pressed the first button to put us on that computer. Now I’m going to pause and say a few things I found odd before I got to this point. When I was flipping through the instruction paper, it had warnings about how the device can cause some radio interference. I still to this day have no clue why, but it did. When gnome came up on the computer, my mouse would just go psycho when I would move it and my screen was a bit blurry.

To fix this wonderful problem was fairly simple. I booted ubuntu backup, and since my keyboard worked, switched to tty1 and ran a sudo dpkg-reconfigure -y xserver-xorg && sudo killall gdm && gdm && exit. That fixed it as it basically recreated my xorg.conf with the new hardware that it detected, as the mouse and keyboard identify as different devices from my Logitech ones. That also fixed the blurriness issues I had.

On devnulled, there was no problem at all. It worked beautifully.

Pictures: