I know this topic has been discussed already, just checking if there is any hope or not to have USB keyboards working under OpenFirmware on Pegasos2. It's really annoying to plug a ps/2 keyboard everytime i need to type something in OF and it messes up sometimes with my dvi/usb kvm.

should i consider that there will never be an update to OF on peg2 to solve it? is it hardware related or just not worth doing it ?

I had the same problems and I found that USB keyboards work fine with the (unreleased) beta firmware. I guess Genesi will send it directly to you if you ask, but I doubt it will be supported and/or accept blame if it breaks your system. OTOH, I found it works fine for more than a year that I have it installed. But as Matt has already stated numerous times, I may just have been lucky.

thanks for the info, i mostly use my peg for testing and experimenting so i would certainly not complain if it break...

I would invest in a USB to PS/2 adapter that works and use that.

USB in the current Pegasos II firmwares out in the wild is broken in some terrible ways (recommend setting usb-enable? false) and doesn't have any drivers for anything relevant (it just maps out a device tree).

In the beta firmwares it's pretty much what you get on the Efika - however as people will attest, that doesn't work with every USB keyboard (or hub or flash drive..) either.

So you may be totally out of luck. In any case, we will not distribute any new firmware for the time being. Perhaps in the future, there could be an Aura firmware (i.e. new abstraction layer) but this will rely more on Linux support and other OS (AROS etc.) being completed before it ships. There is no point installing a new firmware on everyone's system which then breaks every existing OS underneath due to things being even slightly different.. and you know how picky Linux can be about this stuff..

_________________
Matt Sealey

sure but i don't use linux anymore on the pegasos (with a quad core PC next to it that would be absolutely useless, i'm not a dev). I only use the Pegasos with MorphOS and AmigaOS4.1, so i don't see why i would get more trouble with it (these 2 OSes are already unstable by essence : ), well the apps )
So if some report that it works, i feel highly frustrated not to be able to check that by myself.

I don't count on any forthcoming updates, this has been announced dozens of times here for the last 3 or 4 years and nothing happened. I'm not flaming here, i don't really need an update for other reason than being able to use my usb keyboard and my kvm (they both work very well with the efika). (and i don't see the point for Genesi to invest time and effort in an new Aura for the pegasos2)
It's just that, as a long time genesi customer (Peg1, Peg2, Efika, Open client) i'd appreciate being provided with the beta firmware.

Thanks anyway for the explanation matt.

I feel your pain; I have my Pegasos, VIA EPIA and a couple other systems hooked up to a nice 8-port Belkin KVM. bplan have one of these too. It's PS/2+VGA (so basically you need at least one PS/2 keyboard) and supports a USB to a device so you can basically plug an Efika into the KVM and use a PS/2 keyboard.

But it doesn't work on the Efika in firmware (Linux is fine.. ;)

That's annoying in itself and I'd like to see it fixed so I can use less keyboards and mice on my worktable, but I don't get any more new firmwares than you do.. especially because I need to support the majority of users and not the minority of special cases. We are all in the same boat, here.
I think it would cause more trouble than it was worth.. the scenario around it's development meant not much of what was done made it into the mainline firmware. It may have bugs or weird unfinished features which cause all sorts of problems. There were a couple of versions somewhere which broke MorphOS and FFS/SFS filesystem reading for example.. that would be bad for you. We were only playing with Linux (and trying something for Solaris) at the time.

It was not put through quality control or a testing regime other than "it didn't brick my Pegasos".. even then, we did all the development in the "bullpen" at bplan so if it WAS bricked, Gerald was in the next office.

So, we don't distribute it out of respect for our long time customers, more than in spite of them. We don't want you to end up with a system which no longer boots.

_________________
Matt Sealey

understood.

where do i send you an email address for you to send the beta ?


... ok kidding.

i use this nice n cheap product by Lidl:
http://www.mysilvercrest.de/en/artikel.php?a=73

it works like a charm on Peg2 (stock smartfirmware) and Efika too.

_________________
acrux _at_ linuxmail _dot_ org