According to EKP <palazzinaro@gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
> I am retrocomputers lover, and I recently got a Sun IPX.
> I don't know very much about Sun's hardware.
> The problem is that the machine doesn't boot and it even doesn not
> print anything at all: monitor is blank.
> Moreover monitor's led initially becomes green then it starts
> blinking... as if just no signal reaches the monitor.
> I thought that video board is not working. Am i right or wrong?

You don't mention lights blinking on the keyboard, so I'm going
to presume that you don't have a Sun keyboard connected to it. In that
case, the behavior you have observed is normal. It initializes the
monitor (when the LED turns green), and then shuts it back down when it
discovers that there is no keyboard, and shifts all input and output to
the TTYA serial port. (IIRC, on that box, the two serial ports share a
single DB-25 connector, with TTYA being on the normal pins, and a
special connector needed to access TTYB.

Hook up some other computer or terminal to it with a null-modem
cable (connect pin 7 straight across to both, pin 2 on one to pin 3 on
the other and vice versa. I *think* that you may need the CTS or DSR
terminals pulled true by default as well.

And -- the monitor which you use (once you add a Sun keyboard)
needs to be able to display 1152x900 resolution, as that is the default
of the video card.

> I tried to remove Ram, and reinsert every module step by step, to check
> for damaged banks, but nothing changed.
>
> Now, as you surely know, video board is itegrated in the mainboard. So
> I wanted to understand firt of all if it's possible that this problem
> is causated from the video board, or if there can be another cause.
> Then If it's only a video problem, I'd like to know if there's a way to
> solve it.
> I mean... if another video board is pluggable to the expansion's
> slots... or... i don't know...

Yes -- you can install an alternative framebuffer (the Sun term
for graphics cards) and use it by default. But I suspect that the primary
problem is that you don't have a Sun keyboard attached, so it is
switching over to talk to the serial ports instead.

Good Luck,
DoN.

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