On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, matthew green wrote:

>    If you take a PCI graphics card and stick it in a PCI slot in an
>    UltraSPARC workstation then you would need to use XFree86 instead of
>    Xsun.  That is a huge can of worms, especially 4.0 with the screwey
>    dynamic linker.
> 
> 
> that might be so, but we gotta do it sometime ... it doesn't matter,
> the alpha port has been needing it for N years, and only now is it
> finally starting to be possible :)

Not necessarily.  Almost all the machines that take PCI VGA cards also
take UPA FFB cards.  I would much prefer to support FFB than VGA.

In case you're curious, Sun machines have a formal protocol used to access
the keyboard, mouse, and framebuffer, which are implemented by a kernel
driver.  The kernel identifies the frame buffer and keyboard type and
deals w/most of the peculiarities.

XFree86, OTOH, has all those screwey configuration files that are almost
impossible to set up by hand.  And the XFree86 configuration apps only
work well on x86 machines.

Supporting Sun cards is much easier.

Eduardo Horvath