On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 07:02:29AM -0400, Michael wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> > I'm setting up a U10 to use my regular pc flatscreen monitor. Three
> > questions came up.
> > 
> > 1. The text display only uses the center of the display area, I lose
> > about 1.5 inches (~40mm) on every edge. How do I use the entire
> > screen?
> 
> 2.x mimics the firmware output, -current uses all it can get, at least
> with the onboard video.

Using the early 2.0 as I poke through the basics though I need to get to 2.0.2. 

Firmware? As in Terminal-type or OBP ansi-terminal? Of course now that I look at it the Sun monitor on the 13w3 output looks exactly the same, wide margins and all. Sounds like not have X started my be the issue. Of course, X is another issue.  ;)

> 
> > 2. When I hit the backspace key the screen rolls from black on while
> > to white on black and then back again. Is something wrong?
> 
> What kind of video hardware are you using? Onboard? Creator? Something
> else? In 2.x most things are unaccelerated, this changed in -current and
> 3.0

On-board does the black white shift thing, the 13w3 (UPA?) just refreshes the screen slowly.

> 
> > 3. If I want to use the U10 as a desktop for web-viewing normal pages,
> > is the on-board video good enough or would you recommend an additional
> > card?
> 
> Depends what you have, there are many variants of the U5/U10 mainboard
> and they come with two different video controllers - older ones with a
> Rage II and 2MB VRAM, newer ones have a Rage Pro and 4MB VRAM. I have
> the latter and I'm running X in 1152x900 at 24bit, for viewing webpages
> the video controller is certainly not the limit.
> Creator / ffb cards can display higher resolutions in 24 bit, so it
> really depends on which mainboard you have and what resolution you want.
> X11 support in 2.x is rather limited but 3.0 will have (more or less)
> full support for the most common chipsets. 
> dmesg output for the Rage Pro looks like this:
> 
> machfb0 at pci1 dev 2 function 0: ATI Technologies 3D Rage Pro (rev.
> 0x5c) 
> machfb0: 16 MB aperture at 0xe1000000, 4 KB registers at 0xe2000000
> memctl: 00651a77 
> machfb0: 4096 KB SGRAM 98.924 MHz, maximum RAMDAC clock 230 MHz 
> machfb0: initial resolution 1280x1024 at 8 bpp
> 
> ( with a -current kernel. 2.x should be slightly different )

A couple lines from dmesg:

ATI Technologies 3D Rage I/II (VGA display, revision 0x9a) at pci1 dev 2 function 0 not configured

SUNW,ffb at mainbus0 addr 0xfebee000 not configured

> 
> > I have the 13w3 framebuffer card but amd trying to move away from the
> > rather heavy Sun monitor.  ;)
> 
> You can probably use the flatscreen with the onboard video ( it should
> default to 1280x1024 in 8bit, ~70Hz ) or with the Creator if you get an
> adaptor somewhere.
> 
> have fun
> Michael

More poking to do after I drop my wife off.

ciao!

leam