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SERVSWITCH™ AFFINITY
3.2 Guidelines for Using the ServSwitch Affinity with Your Equipment
3.2.1 CPU
S
If you will be attaching IBM PC type computers, use only IBM PC/AT or PS/2 or
100% compatible machines, or recent SGI™ machines. The ServSwitch Affinity
does not support IBM PC/XT™ or compatible machines. It does not support
machines that output CGA or EGA video. (Because the basic hardware design used
by Apple and Sun has remained largely backward-compatible, the Affinity supports
most Sun machines and—with adapters—Apple machines.)
3.2.2 M
OUSE AND
K
EYBOARD
When you power up your ServSwitch Affinity system, make sure that your CPUs,
mice, and keyboards are properly cabled to the system. When you boot up your
CPUs, the Affinity units to which they are connected should already be ON. (You
should be able to freely disconnect and reconnect a mouse or keyboard from a
ServSwitch Affinity while the Affinity is ON, but if you experience problems when
you do this, issue the Reset command
[CTRL] R
—see
Section 6.11
.)
Though the Affinity can convert any supported keyboard or mouse protocol to
any other, this is not enough to overcome all of the vast differences between input
devices. If all of your CPUs are of the same type, we recommend that you use the
corresponding type of keyboard and mouse. (However, the Affinity doesn’t
support Apple keyboards or mice, even though you can use adapters to attach Mac
CPUs.) If your CPUs are of different types, certain limitations tend to favor the use
of certain keyboard and mouse types:
Standard PC keyboards have 101 or 102 keys. PC keyboards designed specifically
for Windows 95/98/2000 have 104 or 105 keys. At this time there is no way for a
101-/102-key keyboard to emulate the functions of the Windows Start (
) and
Windows Application (
) keys on a 104-/105-key keyboard. Standard Apple
keyboards have 105 keys. And Type 5 Sun keyboards have 118 keys as well as
keyclick and beep features. We have mapped several of the Apple and Sun keys to
the PC keyboards (see Table 3-1 at the end of this section), but many of the Sun
keys simply cannot be mapped to IBM keyboards.
For these reasons, we recommend that you use Sun Type 5 (
not
Type 6)
keyboards and Sun mice for mixed-platform applications that include Sun CPUs.
Use IBM keyboards and mice if you have no Sun CPUs attached to your Affinity
system; in particular, use Windows keyboards if
any
of your applications require the
Windows keys, and use three-button mice if
any
of your applications require the
center mouse button.