RE: FrameBuffers

[Rich Payne <rdp@talisman.alphalinux.org>]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, JOHNSTONE,IAIN (A-Scotland,ex1) wrote:

> King of Framebuffers ........ I wish (-:
> 
> Last night I tried to install an other brand of linux (shall remain nameless
> but there is a "hat" involved) because I have had problems getting hold of
> potato for alpha. I assume that my problems are generic rather than with the
> "hatted" brand.

did you try the "hatted" brand in text mode? 
 
> When booting the AlphaServer 1000A from SRM with a CD the GUI install the
> screen goes blank as it the VGA card is not supported. After replacing the
> VGA card with a more generic Cirrus card all went well ... almost (a story
> for another day). The screen went blank also when booting with the Voodoo3.

well, FWIW I've had mixed luck with Voodoo3 cards and X 3.3.6. In some
machine they work fine, others seem to have problems. 4.0 looks to be much
better in this respect.

> I have heard it rumoured that Alphas have problems with fancy video cards
> .... is this true? Should I just go back to Potato for Sparc? Are Alpha's
> too much hassle?

Alphas can be difficult at times, however once you're over the hurdles I
find them much easier to deal with. As for video cards, the only cards
that have a real problem are the NVIDIA TNT2 based cards...they use
extended bios calls that the x86 emulator in the Alphas doesn't
understand, but if you get to SRM/AlphaBIOS/ARCBios then things are
looking good.

--rdp

> Cheers
> Iain
> 
> ______________________________________________________________
> 
> Iain Johnstone
> Technology Engineer, 
> GIO, ESO NT
> Agilent Technologies UK Limited.
> South Queensferry, 
> Scotland, EH30 9TG.
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> ______________________________________________________________ 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christopher C. Chimelis [mailto:chris@debian.org]
> Sent: 06 September 2000 16:08
> To: JOHNSTONE,IAIN (A-Scotland,ex1)
> Cc: debian-alpha@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: FrameBuffers
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, JOHNSTONE,IAIN (A-Scotland,ex1) wrote:
> 
> > Are there limitations on what king of framebuffer can be useds on Alphas
> ...
> > in particular can I use my Voodoo3 3000 in my AS 1000A?
> 
> King of framebuffers?  Wish I had one of those!
> 
> All joking aside, there are only a few "framebuffer" drivers that work on
> Alpha (that is, using the framebuffer device driver).  I just quickly
> looked in the kernel docs and the only ones that I could find listed are
> the Matrox and TGA framebuffer drivers (the docs may be outdated, though).
> 
> HOWEVER, this does NOT preclude you from using that card in an Alpha.  In
> fact, most Voodoo3 cards are known to work in Alphas (I haven't heard of
> one that doesn't yet), although we don't have an X server for them
> yet in the stable tree of Debian.  You could compile one, however, if
> you're so inclined to install XFree86 4.0.x.
> 
> C
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Rich Payne
rpayne@alphalinux.org			www.alphalinux.org


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