I have an old Alphastation 4/233 which spent most of its life
as a headless node.
I recently installed a Matrox video card in it and hooked up a monitor.
I see the normal white-on-blue text as the system boots up
and the boot appears to be normal until I get to the point
configure_console: unable to install generic console
attempting to switch to serial console.
After this point I don't know if the system makes it the rest
of the way up or not. I don't have a properly configured
network connection at the moment and thus can't log on over the
net.
Obviously I could just set the appropriate console environment
variable at the >>> prompt if the system weren't set to auto-boot.
My questions are:
1) Is there any way to halt the system and get a >>> prompt
before it boots all the way up? I think my keyboard is working
but am not sure.
2) would just doing a fresh reinstall off of the CD-ROM
use the video card by default? --if so, how to defeat the autoboot
and get it to boot the CD-ROM instead?
Obviously I could just hook up a serial port but would prefer not
to do so if there is an easier way.
The card is a Matrox Millenium PCI card. As far as I can tell
from the kernel messages it is not being recognized by the kernel
as being seen on the PCI--not surprising since I haven't attempted
to change the config file to have the new card.
Steve
------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven C. Timm (630) 840-8525 timm_at_fnal.gov
http://home.fnal.gov/~timm/
Fermilab Computing Division/Operating Systems Support
Scientific Computing Support Group--Computing Farms Operations
Received on Fri Sep 07 2001 - 16:11:25 NZST