gates@IPSUN.LARC.NASA.GOV (Ray Gates) (07/19/89)
This may be a question which has been answered many times before,
but we are fairly new at this so here goes....
We have installed the Sun server on a Sun 3/280C at NASA/LaRC (NASA
Langley Research Center). We have not patched with anything except the fixes
provided in the distribution (no Purdue,etc.). We can only get the color
display up...no monochrome is available. We have checked /dev and
compared it to a successful server implementation on a Sun 3/60C in my office
and everything seems to match up (as far as /dev goes??). We can successfully
use diskless nodes attached to the 280 (3/60's) without any problem ( that
is , we have both color and monochrome). What are we doing wrong? What have
we missed? Are we that incredibly stupid ?? Any suggestions/responses/etc.
would be greatly appreciated. Thanx.
Ray Gates
gates@ipsun.larc.nasa.gov
CSC/NASA-LaRC
Hampton, VA 23666
804.865.1725abair@turbinia.oakhill.uucp (Alan Bair) (07/21/89)
Let me state what I think you are trying to ask about and then answer that, if I interpreted your question incorrectly, please clarify. You have X running on the Sun3/60 and you get a color and B/W display. I suspect you either start up X to use the specific display or you are letting X find both displays and then switching between them by sliding the cursor off the sides of the screen. Then you expected the same result on the Sun3/280C. Well the problem is that the 2 machines do not have the same type of color buffers. The Sun3/60 and Sun3/110 have a 2 buffer system, one color 8bit(?) plane and a B/W 1bit overlay plane. These are in /dev as follows: Sun3/110 color cgfour0 B/W bwtwo0 Sun3/60 color cgfour0 B/W bwtwo1 The Sun3/280C has a single color 8bit(?) plane. It is in /dev as: cgtwo0. So there is no way to have both display types on the Sun3/280. However, since the Sun3/280 cpu comes with a monochrome buffer, you could hook a monochrome display to this port and have color and B/W. I have heard of people reporting on the net that this works. I do not remember what the /dev entry for this buffer is, sorry. Hope this clears up your confusion. It took me several trys and many helpfull hints from the net to clear this up. The Sun3/60 double display is nice, but Sun stopped building that buffer setup with the 3/60. I have even heard from the net that it is possible to run X on one display while SunTools runs on the other, but I think the Sun X server requires some patches for this to work. Alan Bair SPS CAD Austin, Texas Motorola, Inc. UUCP cs.utexas.edu!oakhill!turbinia!abair