SCO UNIX booting problem

[david nugent]

In <23600 at adm.BRL.MIL> DBarker at 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

-- 
  Unique Computing Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Aust.
  david at csource.oz.au  3:632/348 at fidonet  28:4100/1 at signet