🚀 go-pugleaf

"Frank Mattes" <mattes@gmx.net> writes:

>Hi,

>I hope someone can give me more information how to replace the
>internal cg3 framebuffer in a sparc classic with a cg6 s-bus frame buffer.

>I have bought a used cg6 s-bus framebuffer and thought it will work,
>by just inserting in the free s-bus slot (together with a 19' GDB1692B
>sun monitor). Unfortunally I get only blue/dark blue squares, like a chess
>board on the screen (under netbsd).

>I assume now that I have to do something like stop-a to get into the
>boot rom before inserting the card, configuring the rom - inserting the new
>card and reboot with the monitor on the video cg6 card.

Ok, there are a few things to look at...

First of all, if you want to make the machine use the cg6 as the default
console device instead of the in-built cg3, you will need to modify the
sbus-probe-list NVRAM setting so that the bootROM code probes the Sbus
devices in a different order.

I'm not sure how to do it now, but David Tong's Sun Framebuffer FAQ has the
information. You can find his FAQ linked from my Sun Shack page at
"http://lios.apana.org.au/~cdewick/sun_shack.html".

Secondly, if you are running any of the Solaris 2.x versions, you will need
to reboot the machine with the '-r' argument to force the kernel to create
the right device nodes, etc. for the newly-installed hardware.

If the machine is currently running, log in as root and shut it down with
'init 0' (assuming it's running Solaris 2.x), or 'halt' if it's running
SunOS 4.x, and type 'boot -rv'. The 'v' makes the kernel print out all the
informative startup message so you can see what it's doing.

If the machine is not running, power it on, and as soon as it start to boot
off the disk, hold down the 'stop/L1' key and press 'a' to abort the kernel
and drop back into the ROM monitor. Then type 'boot -rv' as above.

Regards,

Craig.


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