Hi, I just bought a nice new Alpha machine, a PWS 433a with (among other
things) an S3 864 video card.

Because the RedHat Linux installation cd-r I got with it turned out to
be unreadable, I tried how far I would get with the (also broken NetBSD)
cd-r that I have. (I wanted to do that anyway but with a non-broken cd-r
of course).

In the AlphaBIOS setup I selected the SRM for Digital Unix (that seemed
a better choice than SRM for OpenVMS). When I next powered down and up,
the SRM came up, but it told me there was an unsuppored card in slot 4,
and would I please remove it before it would do anything else.

The card in slot 4 was the video card (S3 864).

Of course this is somewhat annoying, since it displayed that message on
the very card it refused to accept.

In the serial console (fortunately I remembered reading about that
recently) it still wanted me to remove the video card, so I gave in.

I also managed to find out how to re-select the AlphaBIOS from the SRM,
through the use of the "EISA configuration utility". Can that be done
in a more straightforward way perhaps?

But my main question is: how can I use the SRM with the video card that
I have? It works well enough to show the countdown and the error
message,I don't see any reason why the SRM would have any trouble with
it. Besides, I obviously want to use the machine with wscons and X, not
headless.

Thanks in advance,
-Olaf.
--
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert - rhialto@polder.ubc.     -- If one tells the truth,
\X/ .kun.nl     -- one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. (Oscar Wilde)