Aloha-

I have recently acquired a Sampo 42" plasma screen to use for data
display. I have four Sun machines hooked up to a KVM switch which had
been on a 21" CRT monitor. When I attached the plasma screen to the
switch, I received a "not supported" message on the screen with three
of the four machines; the only one that displayed properly runs in
Terminal mode with no desktop environment. I at first thought that
the KVM switch, or the boxes that convert Sun monitor/mouse/keyboard
pinouts to other pin configurations that the switch could understand,
were scrambling the signals, but after plugging the plasma screen
directly into one of them (an Ultra 60 with a 15-pin VGA connector
instead of the 13W3 connector) I got the same message. The screen
works great plugged into a PC. After browsing other messages on this
group I came to the conclusion that its the output format of the Sun
machines themselves. I have some specific questions:

1. How can I tell, without rebooting or other potentially traumatic
actions, what the output resolution of my machines are? I recently
inherited the system administrator title with little in the way of
training, and am a little gunshy of messing with the guts of the
machines.

2. Assuming that I find that the machines are feeding an unsupported
resolution to the display, what is the best way to change the display
resolution? I have seen numerous references to the fbconfig command,
but I am not familiar with it.

3. Once changed, how can I change it back (if I screw things up)? I
assume that I will be changing the display parameters while still
connected to the CRT monitor, which should continue to display
properly, then switching it out with the plasma.

4. Any other advice or tips are greatly appreciated.

For your reference, I am trying to display from an Ultra 60, an Ultra
10, and a SparcStation 5, all running Solaris 7. The computer that
displays correctly is another SparcStation 5 sending display to a TTY
port.

Many thanks for any help,
Claus Hetzer

Claus Hetzer wrote:

> Aloha-
>
> I have recently acquired a Sampo 42" plasma screen to use for data
> display. I have four Sun machines hooked up to a KVM switch which had
> been on a 21" CRT monitor. When I attached the plasma screen to the
> switch, I received a "not supported" message on the screen with three
> of the four machines; the only one that displayed properly runs in
> Terminal mode with no desktop environment. I at first thought that
> the KVM switch, or the boxes that convert Sun monitor/mouse/keyboard
> pinouts to other pin configurations that the switch could understand,
> were scrambling the signals, but after plugging the plasma screen
> directly into one of them (an Ultra 60 with a 15-pin VGA connector
> instead of the 13W3 connector) I got the same message. The screen
> works great plugged into a PC. After browsing other messages on this
> group I came to the conclusion that its the output format of the Sun
> machines themselves. I have some specific questions:
>
> 1. How can I tell, without rebooting or other potentially traumatic
> actions, what the output resolution of my machines are? I recently
> inherited the system administrator title with little in the way of
> training, and am a little gunshy of messing with the guts of the
> machines.
>
> 2. Assuming that I find that the machines are feeding an unsupported
> resolution to the display, what is the best way to change the display
> resolution? I have seen numerous references to the fbconfig command,
> but I am not familiar with it.
>
> 3. Once changed, how can I change it back (if I screw things up)? I
> assume that I will be changing the display parameters while still
> connected to the CRT monitor, which should continue to display
> properly, then switching it out with the plasma.
>
> 4. Any other advice or tips are greatly appreciated.
>
> For your reference, I am trying to display from an Ultra 60, an Ultra
> 10, and a SparcStation 5, all running Solaris 7. The computer that
> displays correctly is another SparcStation 5 sending display to a TTY
> port.
>
> Many thanks for any help,
> Claus Hetzer


The method for determining your supported resolutions will vary based
on the type of frame buffer installed in each system.

This link will give you documentation for a number of frame buffers:
http://www.sun.com/products-n-soluti...cts/index.html

You can use the fbconfig command to see what you have installed:
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/806-0625/6j9vfilm7?a=view
At the bottom of this page are links to ffbconfig and afbconfig, two
examples of commands to configure specific frame buffer families.

Once you figure out what frame buffer you have you can query it to
find out what resolutions it supports:
For example, if you have a ffb type card then you would run:
ffbconfig -res
and get a list of supported resolutions.

Now all you need to do is find one that your new plasma screen
supports and set it to that resolution.


Elias