On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 12:46:18PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> 
> It probably depends on the openfirware version, and maybe prom settings.
>

My understanding was that the keyboard was the critical determining factor
as to whether or not to use the serial port as a console.  Certainly, all
the machine I have ever tried this on always use screen/keyboard when the
keyboard is plugged in.  Even though real Sun monitors used to have id
pins to tell you what monitor was connected (yes, in solaris the ioctl's
exist to read this information) I expect that you could not really rely
on the id (what if it was a third party monitor?), so Sun chose just to
test for the presence of the keyboard... much more reliable.

-- 
Brett Lymn