Thanks to those who responded. Consensus, in a nutshell, was "forget it".
Responses:
* "A Trident VGA card is not supported under Digital UNIX."
* " You *might* figure out how to make the
card work -- there is some support in Digital UNIX for "generic VGA" and if
you can figure out the ISACFG commands (good luck), you might get it to work
but it's not supported and it will never be supported. You might be able to
get it to work with the genvmunix console, but you won't be happy with the
way any GUI application runs."
* "ISA-bus Tridents are among the worst VGA cards known. I don't
believe Digital UNIX has support for them either."
Our vendor says there *may* be an ISA VGA card for the alpha 400, he's
waiting to make sure it was a qualified item for DEC and fully supported -
we'll see.
Thanks again!!
Judith Reed
jreed_at_appliedtheory.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
My original post:
Greetings, DU-gurus. I've been tasked with taking a Trident VGA card
removed from some unknown system and making it work in an Alpha 400 4/233,
running DU 4.0b. I'm not much of a PC person, and not used to installing
miscellaneous cards without docs, so please bear with me here.
The card is, I believe, an ISA card, and I installed it in the topmost of
the 3 single ISA slots (not in the dual PCI/ISA slot) in the system, and
attached a monitor. The monitor comes up, and the boot process displays,
up to a point when it is configuring devices fairly far along in the boot,
at which point I get:
configure_console: unable to install generic console. attempting to switch
to serial console.
I attached the old serial terminal, and boot completes there. I am assuming
the card is compatible because it does begin to display, but I'm guessing I
need to reconfigure the kernel to know about this device, whatever it
may be. Questions:
1. Do I have to use ISACFG to tell the system about the card? If so,
how do I know what info to give it?
2. What kernel option do I have to add? And how are the ISA slots
numbered, i.e. what number is the top slot?
Received on Mon Aug 04 1997 - 20:43:26 NZST