On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Greg Earle wrote:

>Want to know the best way to get 24-bit color on a NetBSD/SPARC system?

Not really. I'm not a huge Sun fan to begin with.  This machine exists
solely for the purpose of allowing people to boot into Solaris once in a
blue moon when they need to run a Solaris app.  It's a horrendously slow
box without much utility.  I was just wanting to know why 24bit mode
didn't work under NetBSD and if it was my fault or just unsupported.
That question has been answered.  I threw a spare Sun hard drive at it
and installed NetBSD so at least when it was being used as a terminal
for casual users passing through it wouldn't be so dog slow.  I don't
*really* care if those users are stuck with 8bit.

>Buy a PC or a Macintosh.

I've got both.

>It finally dawned on me that I could run eXodus (X Windows software for the
>Mac) and use XDMCP to get an XDM session with a "rooted" window that was
>1280x1024@24bpp instead of the 1152x900@8bpp I was running on the GDM-20E20
>monitor on the SPARCstation 20.  So now I have a 24-bit color NetBSD/SPARC box.
>
>Think "outside the box" - use the SPARC as a server and put the "display"
>onto something that's more suited for the purpose, given that display cards
>for the PC and Macintosh have since far outstripped low-end UNIX workstation
>offerings.

I do this all the time, but the other way around.  I run software on
cheep PeeCees hiding in the server room and xhost them onto my expensive
SGI toys with great graphics, but for which the native software is
expensive.  It's quite nice.

>Think Different.   :-)

I don't need to, I own real unix workstations.  I've got an r12k SGI
Octane on my desk. =)

Brandon D. Valentine
-- 
bandix at looksharp.net  |  bandix at structbio.vanderbilt.edu
"Truth suffers from too much analysis." -- Ancient Fremen Saying