[comp.unix.i386] Microport V/386,release 3

bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) (02/03/90)

In article <22270@adm.BRL.MIL> IMER400%INDYCMS.BITNET@uicvm.uic.edu (martha rapp) writes:
: I am trying to install the above package on a 386/25mhz with vga paradise
: professional video card and multisync 2.  I cannot get the video to on the
: installation at all.  Apparently as soon as the build disk goes into unix, I
: lose all video and I can go no further.  Any help and/or advise would be
: appreciated. Thanks.

I have had a similar problem with my Tecmar VGA card. My fix may
be appropriate for your system. What I did to fix it was to patch
a kernel variable. The variable is called `kd_dontusebios' and
you set it to 1.

The gotcha is, of course, that you have to run the kernel in
order to do the patch. There are two possibilities. The simple
one is to borrow an EGA card for the installation. Do the patch
after you have a running system and then you can return the EGA.

Another is that there *may* be a patch command on the build disk.
(I'm pretty sure there is.) In which case, you can do this patch
on the build disk by booting the disk and then interrupting the
build program (it is just a shell, to start with), running
/etc/patch, and syncing your disk.

If you are feeling really brave, you can do this with your machine
with the VGA; if you don't know the caveats, you'd better not.
Otherwise, borrow someone else's machine for the very first boot
and then take the (I hope) copy of the build disk back to your
machine.

If all else fails, send me e-mail and I'll see what I can do to
help you with this.

Two final points: this is, at best, a workaround; if your system
does not support that VGA card, it may happen to work in the VGA
card's initial mode, but probably won't work in any other mode.
Moreoever, if a control sequence that happens to attempt switching
to one of those modes is set to the console, your console becomes
mush and you have to reboot.

And: don't forget to do this patch every time you build a new
kernel. (I cheated and added it to my mkunix shell script.)

Note that followups have been directed to comp.unix.i386, a
newsgroup specifically for Unix on '386's.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com