[OpenIndiana-discuss] System halts on boot when there is no keyboard

[Robin Axelsson]

On 2011-04-12 16:45, Nikola M. wrote:
> On 04/10/11 11:56 PM, Robin Axelsson wrote:
>> I'll give it a try. Ken Mays (who replied directly to me and not to
>> the list) has told me that this is a known issue and should be fixed
>> in build 148b. This update can be retrieved from the
>> http://pkg.openindiana.org/dev-il/ repository. It would be interesting
>> to know how it differs from the ordinary /dev repo.
> Great then. I recently upgraded BE to 148b, it is based on IllumOS OS/Net.
> Beside it does not have local keyboard settings but Us english (I did
> not found Gnome keyboard layout switching applet). I did not tried
> unplugging keyboard or boot without keyboard but I am happy to know that
> booting without keyboard is fixed in 148b+.
>> But I find it hard to see how BIOS has anything to do with it. I do
>> get past the BIOS_post and the GRUB bootloader. If the BIOS would
>> object I suppose I would get a No Keyboard BIOS_post error and a halt
>> in the BIOS and not while OpenIndiana is booting up.
> That is right. I just thought that you maybe were not past the BIOS_post
> and found important to mention BIOS settings too, if someone forget
> setting it in BIOS before turning ordinary PC in headless server.
>
> .
>

I can confirm that the 148b update resolved the "no keyboard" issue and 
I can now boot without keyboard. The keyboard is now U.S. English and 
not Swedish which is what I want. What is interesting, however is that 
the keyboard is Swedish in the VNC server (started by the vncserver 
command in bash) and it is Swedish over ssh. The downside to this is 
that there is a serious issue with the keyboard mapping when running a 
virtual machine in VirtualBox and accessing it via the Qt GUI through 
the VNC connection. Characters such as backslash, frontslash and 
asterisk have to be generated by copy and paste.

There is also a very long delay after logging in, starting the vncserver 
and when shutting down the system, a "feature" that came with the 
upgrade from osol_134 to oi_148.