> Thanks for everyone who gave me pointers on running XFree on my
> AlphaStation 500. I'm running 1.6K, and downloaded the XFree 4.2.1
> sources from www.caseydoodle.com, and set up my kernel config
> accordingly. However, there are some glitches.
> 
> 1. dev/ic/vga.c does some things differently for __alpha__
>    Especially irritating was the fact that it sets up the
>    firmware blue as background color, and this really does
>    not do the right thing. Depending on what I run on the
>    console, the screen is sometimes with black background,
>    sometimes with blue, and sometimes its mixed.
> 
>    For example, I start NetBSD and the background is all
>    blue. I run "more <whatever>". The first page comes up
>    with blue background, the next with black etc. Then
>    running somethings else (for example, logout, after which
>    login runs) the background starts going blue again.
> 
>    If I run "vi", the background is blue, but if I run
>    "vim" and it does its own syntax highlighting, the blue
>    background messes everything up very badly.

I have exactly the same problem with 1.6_STABLE on an AlphaPC 164LX with
a PCI video card (it's a S3 Trio64 I think - I don't have access to the
machine right now). When displaying a manual page, the background is
usually black, but after a piece of bold (bright white) text the
background becomes blue until the end of the line, like that:

...
<normal text><bold text><normal text with blue background>
<normal text>
...


Large patches of blue appear also when scrolling by pages (but not when 
scrolling by lines).

I tried also an ISA vga card. SRM console worked OK, but the kernel
paniced immediately (even before probing devices) wih some message
mentioning console. I can repeat and post the exact message.

Bye Pavel