Raspberry Pi Forums

Has anyone had any success with a KVM switch and the Pi?
I have an ioGear GCS1104 KVM switch.

Works fine switching between my Windows 8 home machine and my XP work laptop.
Switching to the Pi, though is an adventure...
The keyboard acts funky, sometimes working, sometimes not, sometimes spitting out characters as if I'm holding down a key.
I checked with another forum and they suggested that the issue is low power and that I should go through a powered hub.

Makes sense.

However, I can't seem to get it just right. If I go from KVM to USB1 on the Pi and then USB powered hub to USB2 on the Pi, it seems to work much better.
The console works - I can login, keys respond well.
But as soon as I get into the GUI and bring up a shell it acts the same way again - keys sometimes working, sometimes not.

Has anyone had any success using a KVM switch with the Raspberry Pi?

Have you tried KVM to powered hub, to Pi?

That results in the erratic behavior.
For example.
For a login I type pi
I might get a 'p', I might get an 'i', I might get nothing.
Or I might get piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

It's bizarro.

I have tried it with a mouse keyboard hooked up directly to it and it works fine.

I also chatted with ioGear tech support. They said they've had no calls from anyone with a Raspberry Pi and didn't offer any suggestions.

"Has anyone had any success using a KVM switch with the Raspberry Pi?"

Yes. I am using a Rose Electronics 8-port KVM switch, with a ps2 keyboard and a wireless mouse. Both the mouse and keyboard cables to the Raspberry Pi are fed into a USB splitter cable, so they only use up one of the USB ports. I have had no trouble with using either the teminal interface or the GUI.

Whilst I don't use a true KVM switch to switch between my netbook and a Pi I do have a "mixed" solution: Keyboard & Mouse are switched by a USB switching hub (which can also switch two other USB devices) - this "shares" the power from the netbook & Pi (but I suspect the netbook is "dominant") or can be powered from an external PSU (rarely necessary). Because the netbook is VGA and the Pi HDMI/DVI the monitor provides the switching for that. Additionally, because I may want to view video from three out of my four Pi's (one is "permanently headless") I also make use of a powered HDMI switcher. Pictures and more details can be found within my webpages at http://www.cpmspectrepi.webspace.virgin ... tcher.html .
Trev.