A friend and I just bought a Sun Ultra 60, and we want to use a PCI
video card so we don't have to buy either an adapter or a Sun monitor.
We realize the seemingly chaotic situation with Sun and support for PCI
video (and something about support for certain ATI cards); however, we
are not running Solaris (we will be running Debian Linux), so having a
driver for the PCI video card is of no problem to us.

My question is: we put the (known working) PCI video card in the
machine, unplugged the Sun video card, but no display occured once we
turned the computer on. Are there any jumper settings or something
similar we need to change in order to allow for the PCI video?

Thank you very much.

Neutralis.The.Eye@gmail.com wrote:
> A friend and I just bought a Sun Ultra 60, and we want to use a PCI
> video card so we don't have to buy either an adapter or a Sun monitor.
> We realize the seemingly chaotic situation with Sun and support for PCI
> video (and something about support for certain ATI cards); however, we
> are not running Solaris (we will be running Debian Linux), so having a
> driver for the PCI video card is of no problem to us.
>
> My question is: we put the (known working) PCI video card in the
> machine, unplugged the Sun video card, but no display occured once we
> turned the computer on. Are there any jumper settings or something
> similar we need to change in order to allow for the PCI video?

AFAIK, the video card is only activated if a (Sun) keyboard is connected.

--
Best regards,
Jeroen Besse
(to contact me: the nospam address actually exists)

.... And we have a Sun keyboard as well as a Sun mouse. I am aware that
a PCI video card will work. I'm just wondering HOW it works.

Neutralis.The.Eye@gmail.com wrote:
> ... And we have a Sun keyboard as well as a Sun mouse. I am aware that
> a PCI video card will work. I'm just wondering HOW it works.

I belive that you need to change SCREEN definition in OBP
to point to the new Video card .

The easiset way to do this is to Have BOTH the OLD and the NEW card
in the WS at once
so you cand investigate what new device path the new wideocard has
generated and then change the SCREEN OBP definition to that
value..

IF you do this wrong and loose the VGA access completley you
will have to reedoit wia the
Serial port and a Vt100 terminal(emulator)

//Lars

Neutralis.The.Eye@gmail.com wrote:
> ... And we have a Sun keyboard as well as a Sun mouse. I am aware that
> a PCI video card will work. I'm just wondering HOW it works.

did you set output-device to it in the boot rom?
going from my fairly limited experience with Sun hardware (SS2 and an
Ultra10) i'm pretty sure you're going to need to set "output-device" to
something reasonable. it will probably default to a serial console
(guessing ttya or ttyb) where you can connect to find your new PCI video
card (ie. /PCI/PCI@xx/etc) and "setenv output-device=/path/to/device"
then reboot. if the card is "supported" then it should display the
nifty Sun logo, mem test, etc.
if, by some chance, you can't connect via serial console then you can
always fly blind (i had to a few times). Stop-A a few times right after
power up then try "setenv output-device=screen". mileage may vary.
that "screen" is just an alias. may or may not match your card...

--
- - james <at> hal-pc.org - -

"Poor is a state of mind. Broke is a state of wallet.
You can fix being broke; it's not so easy to fix being poor."
- Ric Edelman
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Now that makes sense... Just like in Linux. But, how exactly do I go
about finding what the address to the PCI card is?

In article <1134689951.784880.22560@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups. com>, "tunla" <lars.tunkrans@bredband.net>
<11q3t3b37p2ace3@corp.supernews.com>
<1134688336.459309.205260@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups .com> wrote:
>
>Neutralis.The.Eye@gmail.com wrote:
>> ... And we have a Sun keyboard as well as a Sun mouse. I am aware that
>> a PCI video card will work. I'm just wondering HOW it works.
>

If you want to see the firmware messages during very early bootup
(from Sun logo to a kernel activating and taking over),
you pretty much need a Sun graphics card.
What your PC card is missing is the firmware to initialize
the card, and then convert each ASCII character to
a pixels on the screen.
Sun uses fcode (a forth derivitive) for this firmware, but
what's on your PC card is X86 assembly that uses
the VESA console functions of your card's chipset.
Unless this firmware has been written for your card,
it can't be initialized or accesed to display the characters.

You might have luck with Apple versions of cards, since
they also use fcode (Sun used Forth to make it platform
independant, and this was useful for PowerPC, too).
It's actually an IEEE standard software interface, now.
But an Apple card has never actually been tested for this
in a Sun, so you're relying on Apple fcode to work
on a Sun, and that there aren't any quirks with either
relative to the IEEE version.

You could just leave you Sun card in for bootup,
and have Linux talk to your PCI card, and ignore
the Sun one. Also, Suns low end cards are really
OEM'd PC cards (pgx, M64, XVR-100), so Linux
should be able to reinintialize them, if you match
up the right linux driver (you'll lose any messages).


> I belive that you need to change SCREEN definition in OBP
> to point to the new Video card .
>

You'd normally find this with "show-displays" but that won't
show up in the list, unless the proper fcode firmware is found.
If you know how to access the device tree in fcode,
you can discover this pathname (the fcode firmware on the
motherboard knows how to probe cards on the PCI bus),
but unless it finds the proper fcode and entry points
(fcode deferred words) at that address, it will reject it,
and switch back to the serial (failsafe) port.
You could also find the path by tempoarily booting Solaris.
(prtconf -pv should show a node of type display),
but it still points to nothing.





> The easiset way to do this is to Have BOTH the OLD and the NEW card
>in the WS at once
> so you cand investigate what new device path the new wideocard has
> generated and then change the SCREEN OBP definition to that
>value..
>
> IF you do this wrong and loose the VGA access completley you
>will have to reedoit wia the
> Serial port and a Vt100 terminal(emulator)

Actually, there's a way to reset it to the defaults (screen / keyboard)....
It's hitting L1-N at the right time, if memory serves me correctly.
Check the manual ...



>
> //Lars
>

On 15 Dec 2005 13:14:27 -0800, Neutralis.The.Eye@gmail.com wrote:

>A friend and I just bought a Sun Ultra 60, and we want to use a PCI
>video card so we don't have to buy either an adapter or a Sun monitor.
>We realize the seemingly chaotic situation with Sun and support for PCI
>video (and something about support for certain ATI cards); however, we
>are not running Solaris (we will be running Debian Linux), so having a
>driver for the PCI video card is of no problem to us.

Yes, it is. The machine switches to serial console if either keyboard/mouse
or the graphic card ist missing, which makes sense. You will run into
problems if the OBP does not support your graphic card. The 13w3-vga adapter
is the easiest way to solve this.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Frank-Christian Krügel

Neutralis.The.Eye@gmail.com wrote:
> Now that makes sense... Just like in Linux. But, how exactly do I go
> about finding what the address to the PCI card is?

quoting from "x@x.x"'s post:

You'd normally find this with "show-displays" but that won't
show up in the list, unless the proper fcode firmware is found.

if it's not set to serial console then you'll need to do that blind
(assuming you have no way currently to use the Sun video card) and then
try to point output-device to the new pci card. i've never tried a
non-Sun card in my Ultra10 so i have no idea if it'll work, however when
i got the machine it had 2 cards that also work in a PC (so their docs
say at least).

--
- - james <at> hal-pc.org - -

America = Land of the free because of the brave.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Frank-Christian Kruegel wrote:
> The 13w3-vga adapter is the easiest way to solve this.

and they're only ~$10US on ebay

--
- - james <at> hal-pc.org - -

"Poor is a state of mind. Broke is a state of wallet.
You can fix being broke; it's not so easy to fix being poor."
- Ric Edelman
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -