Video Card Problem
Hello, i ran into a little problem with my alpha, and i was hoping htat
one of you could give me a hand here.
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. 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.
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.
The specifics of the box (it it helps) are:
Digital Server 3305 - Model : 6500A
21164 (Noritake according to cpuinfo) at 500Mhz
AlphaBIOS firmware version 5.64
I dont know the SRM version.
Thanks
Richard Fillion
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