On Wed, 2003-09-24 03:21:57 +0200, Maciej Matysiak <phoner.debian@blah.pl>
wrote in message <[🔎] hhfzindlqi.fsf@blah.pl>:
> On the 13th of September 2003 at 15:14, Jaakko Linnosaari <jlinnosa#cc.hut.fi> wrote:
> >> but, after some googling and browsing through various documents, i can
> >> see that there's almost no support for the graphic card i have in that
> >> box - quite impressively looking [1] one: the intergraph powerstorm
> >> 4d40t.
> > Yup, my recommendation would be to get some old Matrox-card to replace it,
> > eg. Millenium or G200; good support in xfree and srm.
>
> several people advised that. does that mean that i can put in any pci card
> supported in kernel? or, do i have to flash the card's rom first (like they
> do with ati/nvidia cards to work with macintosh)? getting old matrox is more
> than tempting, if that's so simple.
Quite some cards will work. However, remind yourself that all video
cards need to be booted. They contain some ROM which the host computer
is expected to execute. Some firmware programmers tried to be clever and
implemented some hackish tricks which the "PC simulator" of your Alpha
won't understand. So it'll not correctly execute the ROM, leaving you
with a non-initialized graphics board (which will not show *anything*
usefull, then...).
Other vendors did this firmware programming more cleanly, giving you a
(build for a PC) card which will even "boot" in your Alpha. Generally,
most Matrox cards work, some S3 cards work, and most (old) ISA standard
VGA cards work, but they won't really do anything more than text mode:)
> On the 14th of September 2003 at 16:32, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw#lug-owl.de> wrote:
>
> >> 0:1/boot/vmlinux-2.4.21-1 ro root=/dev/sda1 video=mode:1024x768
> >> correct?
> >> *reboot*
> >> yay! i can see a penguin on boot :))) much better (although i did something
> >> strange to scsi support and the system refused to give me login prompt ;))
> >>
> >> anyways, that's progress. i'll keep you informed :)
> >
> > Could you please post a 'dmesg' output from right after boot?
>
> http://600au.bigendian.org/dmesg.txt
Wow, a stone age kernel:)
> that's the dmesg i got when booting with generic debian woody kernel.
> unfortunately, i can't make my alpha boot with self-compiled one :(((
> there's something wrong with scsi support. after recognizing the controller
> (qlogic 1020), i got neverending messages:
> scsi: aborting command due to timeout : pid 0, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun0 inquiry 00 00 00 ff 00
> i've tried various kernel configurations, from really minimal to fat with all
> scsi drivers compiled in, but i'm still stuck with scsi init :(
> that's the 2.4.21 from debian kernel-source package.
Well, I'm actually using some 2.6.x. IIRC there are several Qlogic SCSI
drivers, maybe you picked the wrong one. From the .config file,
'CONFIG_SCSI_QLOGIC_ISP=y' is the right one for a Miata...
> > I suspect that you by possibility got vga16fb or something like that to
> > work. On that graphics card that you own, the CL chip is only used for a
> > very small amount of 2D work.
>
> i'd be happy even with that, i think. i don't need fast graphics or fancy
> stuff, just decent framebuffer console.
Then you should keep trying to get 2.4.x (or even 2.6.x, but current
-bk10 needs a little tweak:) up'n'running.
> On the 13th of September 2003 at 21:07, Kelledin <kelledin+DAXP#skarpsey.dyndns.org> wrote:
> as you can see on the photos (link below), there's 3 outputs: one vga (i use
> that), one which looks like vga, but is black, not blue. the monitor doesn't
> show anything when i connect it (no signal detected). the last one is s-video
> like.
> can be. i think that my alpha was used for cad before. i managed to boot tru64
> which survived on the disk, the hostname was "cad64" or so. unfortunately,
> the boot process stopped at nfs mounting and i was not able to do anything
> after that.
:-) Hook up another computer and use tcpdump. You'll see Tru64's IP
address as well as which NFS server it tries to contact. Simply
configure your box to serve this:)
> On the 14th of September 2003 at 16:37, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw#lug-owl.de> wrote:
> >> anyone has idea what's use of those two dimm slots on that powerstorm card?
> >> (i know that i can put there memory ;) but: how much, and what would it be
> >> used for?)
> > I think that 256MB should be easily doable...
>
> 256mb for graphics stuff? impressive, taking into consideration that this
> card is dated 1997 :)
Well, we're not speaking about PeeCees here:)
MfG, JBG
--
Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw@lug-owl.de . +49-172-7608481
"Eine Freie Meinung in einem Freien Kopf | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg
fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier Bürger" | im Internet! | im Irak!
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