On USB Keyboards, OpenSolaris b75, And My Ultra 80

Thu, November 22, 2007 - 8:39 AM PST

I don't fuss around with computers at home nearly as much as I used to - but a few weeks ago I installed build 75 of OpenSolaris on the Ultra 80 and this morning I decided that I'd get my USB keyboard working with it so that I wouldn't have to keep swapping keyboards when I switched over to my work-provided laptop. I don't think I'll ever be able to use a USB keyboard at the OpenBoot PROM, but I don't really mind that so much - I have this system boot straight into X.

But anyways, I went through the usual process of determining the path to the device node so that I could stick it into /etc/system only to discover that, although the system recognized the keyboard and logged it, /devices and /dev/usb didn't acknowledge it being there. `prtconf -D` showed it though, so what was going on? Then I found this. It looks like some time between this build and whatever I was running before, this got broken and so now I can't use my USB keyboard.

This sucks. I was going to buy a USB/DVI KVM (which would be a necessary step before buying a Mac Mini) but if I have to keep swapping around keyboards, I'll just wait until this bug gets fixed. If that ever happens. Because who besides me actually cares about this sort of thing? Nobody. That's who.