Aloha-

I have recently acquired a Sampo 42" plasma screen to use for data
display. I have four Sun machines hooked up to a KVM switch which had
been on a 21" CRT monitor. When I attached the plasma screen to the
switch, I received a "not supported" message on the screen with three
of the four machines; the only one that displayed properly runs in
Terminal mode with no desktop environment. I at first thought that
the KVM switch, or the boxes that convert Sun monitor/mouse/keyboard
pinouts to other pin configurations that the switch could understand,
were scrambling the signals, but after plugging the plasma screen
directly into one of them (an Ultra 60 with a 15-pin VGA connector
instead of the 13W3 connector) I got the same message. The screen
works great plugged into a PC. After browsing other messages on this
group I came to the conclusion that its the output format of the Sun
machines themselves. I have some specific questions:

1. How can I tell, without rebooting or other potentially traumatic
actions, what the output resolution of my machines are? I recently
inherited the system administrator title with little in the way of
training, and am a little gunshy of messing with the guts of the
machines.

2. Assuming that I find that the machines are feeding an unsupported
resolution to the display, what is the best way to change the display
resolution? I have seen numerous references to the fbconfig command,
but I am not familiar with it.

3. Once changed, how can I change it back (if I screw things up)? I
assume that I will be changing the display parameters while still
connected to the CRT monitor, which should continue to display
properly, then switching it out with the plasma.

4. Any other advice or tips are greatly appreciated.

For your reference, I am trying to display from an Ultra 60, an Ultra
10, and a SparcStation 5, all running Solaris 7. The computer that
displays correctly is another SparcStation 5 sending display to a TTY
port.

Many thanks for any help,
Claus Hetzer