Re: Video Card Problem
On Mon, 17 Dec 2001 raptor-32@xgs.dhs.org wrote:
> I bought myself a used Digital Server 3305 off of ebay, and it came with
> no documentation. I managed to install Debian on it, and it works quite
> well. I had Potato with XF3, but i upgraded to Woody with XF4. This
> caused a few problems. XF4 doesnt have support for the S3 Trio which is
> what the alpha has onboard. So i decided to buy a video card for it, an
> ATI Radeon 32Meg SDR for PCI. I put it in the first slot, moved the
> jumper needed to disable onboard video, turned the box on, and the
> monitor gets no signal. I looked up on ATI's site, and they said that
> the card requires PCI 2.2, so i figured that the box was just too old
> for that. So i tried the TNT based card i have in this computer to
> test, same thing.
Both those cards are to new to be supported by the BIOS emulator. The
Alphas have an x86 emulator in the firmware that allows them the run and
initialize your video cards.....Radeon's only work with the newest SRMs
and TNTs just started working before that, and I'm sure neither of those
versions are available for your machine.
> I tried with and old S3 Trio64, same thing. I read
> (i think on this ML's archives) that video cards need to be in the 64bit
> slot, so i tried that, didnt help. I dont know how far the boot goes,
> nor do i have a VT100 dumb terminal to hook to the port in the back to
> check.
Well, I don't know the bus layout of this machine, but usually you want
the video card to be on the first PCI bus, and not behind any PCI bridges
as the emulator doesn't handle that. Again, I don't know about the slots
on this machine. It's probably worth getting the latest firmware for your
machine...it's available from:
ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/Alpha/firmware/v6.1/
I think the 3300 series was the white box (aka NT) version of the AS800,
but you might want to check on that.
> Another problem i had is with a SB Live (yes, im a sucker for marketing
> when it comes to hardware). Debian detects it, when i do cat /proc/pci,
> i see it, the driver installs just fine, i can do "cat /dev/sda >
> /dev/dsp" and no error occurs, but no sound comes out of the card.
Interesting test.....have you started a mixer and checked the volume
levels? You may also want to just try playing a CD or MP3 file.
--rdp
--
Rich Payne
rpayne@alphalinux.org www.alphalinux.org
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