I've seen reports for years about folks having problems with some KVMs under Linux. I've never personally had one myself. However I've been helping a Windows friend break his Redmond addiction over the last few months using Gentoo. He has a nice 3 monitor KDE-based system that's been working fine but there was one monitor that refused to set up with the right resolution. We left it alone for a long time as it was usable but finally yesterday got together to figure out what was happening. From the title it should be clear that the problem was a KVM hooked to that one monitor. Removing the KVM completely solved the problem.
Now, what I'm wondering is why this same video card/KVM/monitor combination which apparently worked in Windows should have any problems in Linux? Anyone know why? In the spirit of full discloser I don't really know that this _specific_ video card was tested in Windows, but he owns multiple NVidia 8400GS cards and it's my understanding that other 8400GS cards did work with this KVM & monitor, so unless it's this specific card having a defect, or even being just a bit weak in some way, it would seem to be the insertion of the KVM itself that upset things. Looking at the monitor's specs/requirements for running the higher resolutions it uses, as should not be a surprise, higher frequencies to do higher resolutions. If the KVM was filtering those a bit then it's possible things wouldn't work, but that doesn't explain why it did work in Windows. Basically, I looked around in Google for anyone that had real info about why this problem occurs, couldn't find any that made sense, and am wondering how to choose a KVM that's going to work out of the box short of asking for model numbers, etc. Cheers, Mark
