I have a Personal Workstation 433au with an S3 86c764/765 (Trio
32/64/64+) graphics card in it. This works with Windows and with
OpenVMS just fine. I assume it was working with Tru64 UNIX as well, as
that is what was installed when I obtained this box.
However, I can't find a suitable X driver or configuration to get this
card to work even at plain VGA levels with Alpha Linux. Logically, the
s3 driver should do the trick but no matter what I try, it doesn't
activate the card. DEC did sell a lot of these with that card in them,
I believe, and it seems as if we must have support for it buried
somewhere. However, even the man page for the s3 driver is missing
from the current distribution, though the driver is still included.
I could actually live without X on this machine, since it works well
enough as a client to other machines. However, I really would like to
at least have a shell interface from the console, and even that does
not work. Booting from SRM (which finds the keyboard and video card
without difficulty) I do get the bootup messages right up to the point
at which Apache loads. I think this is part of init level 3. Then the
display stops updating, and the keyboard is unresponsive.
The system finishes booting and can be reached via ssh from another
node, though. What do I have to do to keep the attached keyboard and
monitor working?
--Gary (tivo.overo@gmail.com)