Thanks to all who responded:
Dave Golden <golden_at_falcon.invincible.com>
Stuart McKenzie <managers_at_mannet.mcb.net>
Randy M. Hayman <haymanr_at_icefog.sois.alaska.edu>
Martin Cohen <mcohen_at_nrtc.northrop.com>
Javier Aida <jaida_at_gmd.com.pe>
Hellebo Knut <Knut.Hellebo_at_nho.hydro.com>
Dr. Tom Blinn, 603-881-0646 <tpb_at_zk3.dec.com>
I had originally asked:
> We have a standard VGA monitor connected to the built-in VGA port on the
> system board.
> Our problem: Unix doesn't seem to know how to talk to this console.
> What do we need to do to get the VGA to work properly?
Tom Blinn summed it up nicely:
>Are you running the X Window System on the console? If not, then you are
>not going to get the console to work except as a "dumb terminal", which is
>what the symptoms you are describing sound like. That is, it will work in
>VGA text mode, but it doesn't have cursor addressing, etc. of the kind that
>are needed by curses, which is what makes things like "more" work nicely on
>"real" terminals.
A couple of folks suggested using "stty size" to find out how many rows
and columns the system thinks the display has, then setting the correct
number if needed by using "stty rows yy" and "stty cols xx". This at
least makes "more" usable.
Two people suggested adding a line like
controller vga0 at eisa0 slot 13 vector vgaintr
to the system configuration file and rebuilding the kernel. We haven't
tried this.
The most common suggestion was that we should just run an X session on
the console; this is in fact what we do on our Ultrix box. But it doesn't
seem very practical to run an Xterm on a 640 by 480 9-inch screen...
So, we've dispensed with the VGA monitor for the moment and have hooked
up a serial terminal to the COM1 port. The system will use COM1 as its
console if it boots up with the Alpha keyboard and mouse disconnected.
Kai Lanz kai_at_pangea.stanford.edu
Received on Wed Feb 21 1996 - 22:21:58 NZDT