Re: two monitors
On Tue, 24 Feb 1998 adavis@netpci.com wrote:
> I am trying to get an old mda (hercules compatible?) card going together
> with a Matrox Millenium on an ASUS P55T4P2 motherboard. On my quest, I have
> found two ways to do this, one of which almost works---a "multimon" kernel
> patch that has compiled cleanly on 2.0.33. A second approach is called
> "mda" and is a module.
>
> Neither of them works for me yet. Multimon seems to show the most promise,
> and apparently is the more flexible approach in all, anyway. I suspect the
> mono card may not be good: the linux kernel boots with both monitors
> established by the kernel during the boot process, but I can't get a
> boot from the mono card, even if I remove the svga card---the bios won't
> even write the change of monitor type to cmos.
>
> I set gettys up on tty9 and tty11 for the mono monitor: when I switch to
> those vc's, the cursor disappears from the svga monitor; but it never shows
> up on the mono monitor---that monitor never does a single thing ever.
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated. My experiments are encouraging, at
> least, so I wanted to mention them with respect to the current thread. The
> URLs are:
I suspect the second video card you are trying to use is broken.
I have used both the "multimon" kernel patch and the "mda" module with
success on a Hercules card. I'll summarize the pros and cons of both,
should anyone else be interested.
multimon:
+ lets you assign a range of ttys to the mono monitor
- you must choose this range by editing the kernel source and re-compile
the kernel if you change your mind
- when you run (or switch to) an X server on the VGA card, _both_ text
screens go blank, so the mono monitor is useless while you are using X
on the VGA monitor; the text screens come back when the X server exits
or when you switch to a text console
mda:
+ doesn't go blank if the VGA card runs X
- is a 'character device', so it only accepts output from programs
I have used the mda module for quite a time, constantly running a 'top -i'
at it. I couldn't find another use for it. Nowadays the mono monitor is
not even attached to the computer.
Remco
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