Peter Petrakis [voodoo@alphadriven.org] wrote: > I'm sorry but if you want to run a graphics card in that machine, It > will probably never work. There is no x86 bios emulator support in > the firmware. It was removed to conserve space and make room for the > linux in rom (never finished). So then it will never be able to initialize most PCI devices? That's a crappy design... How many PCI devices don't have a BIOS? Wouldn't the bios emulator be part of SRM? Is there anything I can do from the SRM to initialize the card? > It was never meant to be a console machine, It was specially designed > for mass clustering and to operate headless. Well, I have a backup use for it if I can't get it to display anything. (I got it cheap off ebay for video encoding) > Your only hope is to somehow get the Xfree bios emulator to set up > the card properly. Last time I checked, their bios emulator still > depends on the previous firmware to have "done the right thing (tm)". XFree86 hangs on startup without ever doing anything to the screen. It does say: (WW) MGA(0): Video BIOS info block not detected! > Keyboard/mouse support may be possible at the OS level using a USB card > but you'll have no control at the firmware level. > > In an ideal world. A new firmware could be written that supported x86 > bios emulation and newer devices. > > The best use you could get out of this thing is to run it on the > network and an open a X session to it. Not useful for displaying video. The bandwidth requirements are prohibitive. > Finally if you bought this from someone and they told you VGA would > work in it, they're a bold faced liar. Demand your money back. Nobody told me that, it's my own fault. Thanks, Bob McElrath [Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison, Department of Physics] "You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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