Missing mouse halts boot

SuSE GNU/Linux 8.1:

You know things are serious when your mouse problems are keeping you awake at night.

A system connected to a KVM switch (Keyboard Video Mouse switch) would sometimes halt during boot because it could not find a mouse during its initial hardware scan.This would happen when the mouse and keyboard were not connected during boot (because the KVM switch had them connected to some other computer system). Under these circumstances the booting system would halt the boot process and display a menu from which the mouse had to be manually chosen.

Because the mouse had to be manually chosen, manual intervention was required at every boot — either to operate the KVM switch to allow the automatic hardware detection to occur or to manually choose the mouse. This was inconvenient.

This problem was easily resolved using the YaST runlevel editor.The hardware scan program was being told to operate in run levels 2, 3 and 5 but, using the runlevel editor, it was simply disabled altogether.If the hardware is ever changed then, of course, it will be necessary to manually re-run the hardware scanning program.

End of notes

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Erratic mouse behaviour when using KVM switch