I was digging through Github one fine evening because well I don’t remember why and I ended up on QMK, the firmware used in most (decent) mechanical keyboards. I noticed that VIA support was added for the Drop (Massdrop) CTRL, the ALT already had VIA support. Hey, I have a Drop CTRL! So I decided to I wanted to flash the board and get VIA support. Who doesn’t want VIA support? Down the rabbit hole I go, and I tossed in some extras.
I wanted to upgrade a few of the things I use in my daily life. I decided that my 10 year old full size corded Apple Mac keyboard and my 15 year old corded Logitech G3 gaming mouse needed to be retired. While they have performed greatly in their years of faithful service I think it is time to move on.
I started looking around. I wanted a keyboard with RGB LEDs, that was one of my requirements and what I landed on was mechanical keyboards. There are a ton of mechanical keyboards out there. I’ve been reading on them for a few days now and I still know nothing about them. It is a huge rabbit hole of tech. There are a ton of brands and manufacturers as well as DIY kits so you can build your own from scratch. I don’t know much so I decided to go with a premade keyboard versus building my own. Out of all the brands out there I landed with Keychron, and for one major reason alone – they are the only RGB mechanical keyboard that I could find that was Mac friendly. As far as I can tell Corsair and Logitech are the only two brands with software for their mice and keyboards that support Apple Macs. That is quite limiting for one using said machines, like me. The common answer I found regarding Macs and keyboards was “plug it into a PC to change the settings then move it back”…yeah a big fuck no to that. The Keychron keyboards not only have Mac keys installed out of the box they also do not have any software. While this means I don’t get to map the RGBs and keys and make fancy color combos, which kinda sucks, I do get a mechanical keyboard that supports my OS and has RGB modes. Thats good enough for me.
After trying to do a fresh install of Zentyal 3.4 a few times unsuccessfully I just gave up. I tried multiple discs and USB flash drives to no avail. Come to find out recently thats a bug in the Ubuntu 13.10 installer. It disables some motherboards USB ports during installation. Right after language selection the system appears to hang. The keyboard stops functioning, caps lock nor num lock respond.
There is a work around! If you can, use a PS/2 keyboard and problem solved. If you can’t some people mention unplugging and moving the keyboard to a different USB port works for them. There are also reports of using a USB switch to bypass this issue.
During all of my searches I found this page to be of the most help:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/377728/usb-keyboard-stops-working-on-installation-at-language-selection
Hopefully this saves you some time.
