> So, I was interested in knowing if anybody on port-vax has begun
> any work on getting X11 running? If so could you email me? If I don't
> hear anything I'll assume *nobody* has begun, and I'll start myself.

I'll help any way I can...  I've got four M30's (no color cards, just
the onboard mono) and the 20" mono monitors to boot...

> To that end... does anybody have any docs on the graphics chipset?
> Either way I want to play with it, and the drivers. Maybe... I could
> help out by working out a console driver? unless it's already too
> far underway.

I got these vaxes from a team that did a LOT of CAD programming on them
(that recently switched to all alpha), I'll see if they still have the
docs.  Most likely next week tho, my contact over there is out of state
until then.
 
> Last question (for now on the 3100 :-)  has to do with the SCSI jack. I
> know I have to go back and read up on the archives, bring myself up to
> speed with respect to the 3100's, but I'm assuming the external SCSI is
> something that's working these days? I've got 2 internal drives, but
> the prospect of attaching something external gives me oodles of disk
> space beyond what my uVaxII can support!

If the external SCSI jack on the M38 is like the M30 (I have the dual
SCSI controller M30 by the way) that it is actually just an extention of
the 'DKB' controller...  I've got one vax with two internal 100mb
drives, netbooting off a FreeBSD box w/ its own 340mb IDE, and an
external CD-ROM on the external chain...  My CD is DKB400, the second
hard drive is DKB300, and the first hard drive is DKA300....  

The problem with the SCSI drives on the M30 (this may be a problem for
the M38 also) is that the SCSI Drivers in NetBSD aren't fully developed
yet, and they are using a PIO mode on them...  Best speed I have gotten
yet (using 'dd' as the benchmark) is 29k/sec...  sickly!  I've decided
to netboot & keep all binaries, etc on the boot server (FreeBSD) and
keep little stuff (html, ircd.conf, etc) on the scsi drives.

Good luck and keep us all informed!
JS