Boot without keyboard

[ABrady]

On Sun, 04 Jul 2004 11:12:52 +0100
Philip Gaskell <pdgaskell at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm running rh9 with kernel version 2.4.20-8 and my box won't boot
> without a keyboard. I've told BIOS to ignore checking for the
> keyboard, and the grub bootloader starts then starts to load linux but
> then linux just hangs. I've heard about using keyboard dongles or even
> plugging a mouse into the keyboard socket to make it work, but surely
> there is a better alternative, somewhere in the configuration.
> 
> By the way the box will boot fine without a mouse or monitor
> 
> I've searched high and low all over google and can't seem to find
> anything other than the solutions mentioned before, which I don't
> think are at all a worthwhile solution

Here's a solution you missed:

http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.0/0468.html

and another:

http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9902.2/0740.html

and some more information:

http://isp-lists.isp-planet.com/isp-linux/0206/msg00560.html

and another hint concerning redirecting the console to the serial port:

http://lists.parisc-linux.org/pipermail/parisc-linux/2000-December/010492.html

Those are just some quick finds using "boot linux no keyboard" and
"linux no keyboard fail".

It mostly appears (to me) that you'll either need to redirect the
console to the serial port (?) or turn off apm support in the kernel,
according to those links.

Yeah, I found references to keyboard emulators and the like, but it
shouldn't be a requirement if I can turn it off in the BIOS and the
machine doesn't care.

I don't vouch for their fix ideas since I never tried doing it, but
there are some things to try other than dongles or leaving the keyboard
attached.