Subject: Re: X on Sparc
To: Dave McGuire <mcguire@neurotica.com>
From: Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.futureone.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 01/30/1998 01:41:35
On 30-Jan-98 Dave McGuire spoke unto us all:

#   The ctrl-alt-backspace trick is an XFree86 thing, not an X thing.  I
# don't know of any way to do that under X...but I haven't looked very
# hard since I've never *needed* a way to do that. :)

I figured so... though I've seen some IBM x-terms (hardware) that it works on
just fine.  It just caught me off guard.. I installed everything, and said
"lets just see if X works..  #X&  umm.. ok.. now what.."  I hadn't made myself
a backdoor to get into it yet.. so I was forced to Stop-A. 

#   Sounds like a monitor adjustment issue...the cg6 is a
# single-sync-rate card, so inter-mode alignment variations aren't
# really the result of framebuffer-ish things.  I've seen many monitors,
# however, whose images would exhibit shrinkage that seemed to
# correspond with the amount of non-dark areas on the display...a
# current draw thing, I'd guess.

I assume you mean I would need to adjust all the knobs..  being that there
aren't any.. I assume that means "live with it"

#   You want xconsole.  Take a peek at the man pages for it.  It does
# what you need here.

Ahh.. was just wondering if there was another way to do it.. guess not.. my
machine gets it's display from xdm on my i386.. guess I'll have to put a script
together to launch the right one. Would be nice if I could make it all "just go
away".

# 
# > On a side note.. I have to admit.. NetBSD/sparc is *FAST*.  The X
# performance
# > on this Sparc1 blows away any of my old 486's.  I thought this machine was
# > gonna be a hog, but it really surprised me.
# 
#   Welcome to the non-PC world. :)
# 

And *OH* how I've been struggling to get away from the PC world..  Bought an
alpha.. spent a month screaming at it pulling hair, thinking the MB was toast
(multia) only to find out my memory was bad...  God I want to get that alpha
booted..  Number one thing I like about non-pc's is the hardware boot
consoles..  like the DEC SRM, and the OpenBoot.  God they are so much nicer
than "stick a floppy in and pray" or shutdown==reboot==halt it's nice to reboot
a machine without having to hit a button.  ;)

---
Tim Rightnour    -  root@garbled.futureone.com
http://www.zynetwc.com/~garbled/garbled.html