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From: david@csource.OZ.AU (david nugent)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: SCO UNIX booting problem
Message-ID: <19@csource.OZ.AU>
Date: 13 Jun 90 11:25:31 GMT
References: <23600@adm.BRL.MIL>
Organization: Unique Computing Pty Ltd, Melb, Aust.
Lines: 37

In <23600@adm.BRL.MIL> DBarker@system-m.phx.bull.com ( Deryk Barker) writes:

>Maybe  someone  has some idea what's going on here.  When I boot 
>my SCO UNIX V 3.2  on  my 386 I have a problem that appears maybe 
>8 times out of 10.  As the system comes up it obviously does some 
>sort of equipment initialisation which, among  other  things, turns 
>NumLock off on my AT keyboard (which is how I know it's doing the 
>keyboard init).  The problem is that frequently after this init
>process the system will not respond to my keyboard at all and I 
>am dead in the water.

I should preface this and state that I've had no direct experience with
SCO's Unix product.  But with Xenix, I often came across this; the release
notes mentioned it specifically and explained a patch that could be
made to the kernel using adb which fixed it.  The problem is related to
handling of the LED's on the keyboard; and after the patch, they no
longer work.  Well, at least the keyboard doesn't lock up any more. :-)

On a machine which this used to happen to, I've since upgraded to
ISC's product, and I often have something similar happen - usually
a keyboard lockup except it occurs more frequently when running an
app on one of the terminal consoles which does plenty of termio
and messing with keyboard modes.  I found that unplugging the keyboard
briefly and plugging it back in achieved the same result as the SCO
patch - the LED's no longer functioned, and the keyboard became
operative again.  Anything is preferable to bringing down the
system ungraciously...

Hope this helps; I'd suggest looking in SCO's release notes to see if
you can find anything useful in there.


david

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