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Solaris X86ers:

While I have been using Solaris for years it has been a very long time since
I tried Solaris X86. That being said, I now have a laptop (Dell 8100 with an
NVidia card, 16MB or 32MB, I forget which).

I understand that XFree86 (video drivers) using the "porting kit" can be
made to work on Solaris, so that the Solaris windowing environment can run
using the XFree86 driver set.

I have looked at XIG drivers, and they do NOT make an NVidia driver, so
please do not suggest that.

Does XFree86 support the NVidia (Geforce 2) card with Solaris?

I was told there is an NVidia driver (non-XFree86) for Solaris?

What monitor type do I pick for a laptop LCD, that is 1600x1200 (I am
willing accept a lower resolution to make this work)?

What are the differences between the Solaris NVidia driver (if it is for a
Geforce 2) and the XFree86 version?

My first goal would be to get the Sun windowing environment up and running,
though after that it would be nice to have GNOME also.

Is there a how-to on doing this?


Thank you in advance,

Stuart

On Sun, 21 Sep 2003 08:28:33 -0700, "Stuart Blake Tener"
<stuart@misty.com> wrote:

>Solaris X86ers:
>
>While I have been using Solaris for years it has been a very long time since
>I tried Solaris X86. That being said, I now have a laptop (Dell 8100 with an
>NVidia card, 16MB or 32MB, I forget which).
>
>................................................. .....blah
>
>Thank you in advance,
>
>Stuart
>

Stuart,

If you install Solaris 9 x86, the porting kit is included in the main
install. You don't need the porting kit with S9.

Boll Weevil wrote:
> If you install Solaris 9 x86, the porting kit is included in the main
> install. You don't need the porting kit with S9.

Does that mean one could, say, install Solaris 9 on a system with
a GeForce 4 in it (or something else that a sorta-recent XFree86
release runs on) and have it "just work", preferably through the
normal kdmconfig way? Or is there still extra hassle involved
in making things work?

The reason I'm asking is that I have this great dual-processor
Athlon system that would love to have Solaris on it. (Well,
if I could ever figure out why the time-of-day stuff seems
so screwed up -- the Solaris install complains that the battery
may be dead (which it's not), and then when it gets to the
point where I should set the date, it just goes into a loop
where it beeps constantly.)

- Logan

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 21:11:44 GMT, lshaw-usenet@austin.rr.com wrote:
>Boll Weevil wrote:
>> If you install Solaris 9 x86, the porting kit is included in the main
>> install. You don't need the porting kit with S9.
>
>Does that mean one could, say, install Solaris 9 on a system with
>a GeForce 4 in it (or something else that a sorta-recent XFree86
>release runs on)

it would be more accurate to say "that a not-so-recent xfree86 runs on"
:-)

but that being said, GeForce 4s seem to display 2d just fine with it.




--
http://www.blastwave.org/ for solaris pre-packaged binaries with pkg-get
Organized by the author of pkg-get
[Trim the no-bots from my address to reply to me by email!]
S.1618 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquer...5:SN01618:@@@D
http://www.spamlaws.com/state/ca1.html

Boll Weevil <not@home.com> writes:

> On Sun, 21 Sep 2003 08:28:33 -0700, "Stuart Blake Tener"
> <stuart@misty.com> wrote:
>
> >While I have been using Solaris for years it has been a very long time since
> >I tried Solaris X86. That being said, I now have a laptop (Dell 8100 with an
> >NVidia card, 16MB or 32MB, I forget which).

> If you install Solaris 9 x86, the porting kit is included in the main
> install. You don't need the porting kit with S9.

Only the VESA driver and the Trident driver from XFree86 are included
with Solaris 9 x86 (or the Solaris 8 x86 video driver patch).


% cd /usr/openwin/server/modules/
% ls -l *xf86*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root bin 821068 Jan 17 2002 ddxSUNWxf86trident.so.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root bin 1135968 Jan 17 2002 ddxSUNWxf86vesa.so.1

Note that there are known bugs (malloc heap corruption, unable to
restore text screen) with Sun's modules, so they may not work to well
in some cases. The same bugs can be found in Sun's "xfree86 4.2.0
porting kit" modules. The porting kit available from
<URL:http://www.tools.de/solaris/xf86> includes fixes for these
problems.

If you add the "xfree86 porting kit" video drivers on top of Solaris
8/9/10_40 x86 you'll get a lot of extra video card drivers from
XFree86. The list of additional video drivers currently includes:

APM "Products from Alliance Pro Motion"
ARK "Products from Ark Logic"
ATI "VGAWonder, Mach8, Mach32, Mach64, Rage128, Radeon"
CHIPS "ct655*, ct64200, ct64300, ct68554, ct69000, ct69030"
CIRRUS "Products from Cirrus Logic"
CYRIX "MediaGX, MediaGXi, MediaGXm"
FBDEV "Framebuffer devices"
GLINT "GLINT and Permedia based video cards"
I128 "I128, I128-II, I128-T2R, I128-T2R4, I128-R3D, I128-R4"
I740 "Intel i740"
I810 "Intel integrated graphics chipsets, i810, i810-DC100, i810e, i815, 830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, 865G
IMSTT "Integrated Mico Solns"
MGA "MGA2064W, MGA1064SG, MGA2164W, G100, G200, G400, G450, G550"
"NM2070, NM2090, NM2093, NM2097, NM2160, NM2200, NM2230, NM2360, NM2380"
NEWPORT "SGI Indy's newport cards"
NSC "National Semiconductors GEODE processor family"
NV "RIVA128, RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2, GeForce256, GeForce2 (GTS,Ulta,MX), GeForce3, Quandro*"
"V1000, V2100, V2200"
S3VIRGE "ViRGE, ViRGE VX, ViRGE DX, ViRGE GX, ViRGE GX2, ViRGE MX, ViRGE MX+, Trio3D, Trio3D/2X"
S3 "S3's non- ViRGE or Savage products"
SAVAGE "Savage3D, Savage4, Savage2000, Savage/MX, Savage/IX, ProSavage"
"Lynx, LynxE, Lynx3D, LynxEM, LynxEM+, Lynx3DM"
SIS "SiS6326, SiS530, 5597/5598"
TDFX "Products from 3Dfx"
TGA "DEC21030"
TRIDENT "Blade, Image, ProVidia, TGUI"
TSENG "Products from Tseng Labs"
VESA "VESA-compatible video cards"
VIA "Products from VIA, CLE266, KM400, K8M800"
VGA "VGA-compatible video cards"
VMWARE "VMware SVGA virtual video cards"

Logan Shaw <lshaw-usenet@austin.rr.com> writes:

> Boll Weevil wrote:
> > If you install Solaris 9 x86, the porting kit is included in the main
> > install. You don't need the porting kit with S9.
>
> Does that mean one could, say, install Solaris 9 on a system with
> a GeForce 4 in it (or something else that a sorta-recent XFree86
> release runs on) and have it "just work", preferably through the
> normal kdmconfig way? Or is there still extra hassle involved
> in making things work?

Not all XFree86 video drivers are included with Solaris 9 x86, only
two: the VESA and Trident driver.

So, you still may want to pkgadd the latest "Solaris XFree86 Video
Drivers and Porting Kit", and then use kdmconfig to configure your
video card:

http://www.tools.de/solaris/xf86/#binary

> The reason I'm asking is that I have this great dual-processor
> Athlon system that would love to have Solaris on it. (Well,
> if I could ever figure out why the time-of-day stuff seems
> so screwed up -- the Solaris install complains that the battery
> may be dead (which it's not), and then when it gets to the
> point where I should set the date, it just goes into a loop
> where it beeps constantly.)

Hmm, I've observed cmos time-of-day problems with the AMD-766
southbridge chip (tyan tiger mp board), when using a PS/2 keyboard, or
when using an USB keyboard or mouse in "USB legacy" mode.

See

http://www.tools.de/solaris/amd/

An USB mouse running in "USB legacy" mode (HW emulates a PS/2 mouse)
triggers the problem quite often, obviously due to the huge amount
of data produced by a mouse.


I've worked around the problem by installing a PCI UHCI controller
card (VIA Technologies Inc, VT83C572 chip), and connecting an USB
mouse to that UHCI controller. The extra PCI UHCI controller card is
necessary, because the on-board OHCI controller is not supported with
Solaris 8/9 x86 (but should work with Solaris 10 s10_40 x86).

Juergen Keil wrote:
> Hmm, I've observed cmos time-of-day problems with the AMD-766
> southbridge chip (tyan tiger mp board), when using a PS/2 keyboard, or
> when using an USB keyboard or mouse in "USB legacy" mode.
>
> See
>
> http://www.tools.de/solaris/amd/

Thanks -- that information could turn out to be VERY helpful!

Indeed it is the AMD 760 chipset, and I am using a PS/2 keyboard.
Perhaps I should try a USB keyboard. (I bought the system from
a friend who says he never had troubles -- quite possibly because
he uses a USB keyboard!)

Of course, there are some other strange behaviors, like that
1/2 of the time, it simply won't boot up. Cold boot (i.e. power
cycle) seems to work, but just hitting the reset switch causes
it to go into some sort of bizarre state where even the graphics
card is turned off. (But there are no POST error beeps like
there are when, say, I remove all the memory.)

Gotta love flakey PC hardware. Have to admit I never had this
sort of problem with Sun machines. Not to say they're trouble-free
completely, but they do tend to not make it to market with a
wide variety of glaring stupid problems...

- Logan

Stuart Blake Tener wrote:
> Solaris X86ers:
>
> While I have been using Solaris for years it has been a very long time since
> I tried Solaris X86. That being said, I now have a laptop (Dell 8100 with an
> NVidia card, 16MB or 32MB, I forget which).
>
> I understand that XFree86 (video drivers) using the "porting kit" can be
> made to work on Solaris, so that the Solaris windowing environment can run
> using the XFree86 driver set.
>
> I have looked at XIG drivers, and they do NOT make an NVidia driver, so
> please do not suggest that.
>
> Does XFree86 support the NVidia (Geforce 2) card with Solaris?

Yes. The NV driver does not support any fancy 3D (ie. OpenGL) or
multi-video port cards but they are awesome for hi-res, hi-depth
desktops. XFree86 4.3.0 bunbled NV driver supports I think all cards
models introduced 6 months or older. I use, everyday the following cards:

nVidia Corporation NV17GL [Quadro4 200/400 NVS] rev 16
nVidia Corporation NV5 [RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro] rev 17

TNT cards should work no prob, and GF2/GF3 too. Quadro4 card is a dual
vidport card and I can only get one port to work.

Platforms I have used this solution on:

Solaris 9 x86
- XFree86 4.3.0, 4.3.99.7, 4.3.99.12
- built with GCC 3.2.1

Solaris 10 x86 b40
- XFree86 4.3.99.7, 4.3.99.12
- built with GCC 3.3.1

"Logan Shaw" <lshaw-usenet@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
news:kG2cb.89870$jV1.77516@twister.austin.rr.com.. .
> Boll Weevil wrote:
> > If you install Solaris 9 x86, the porting kit is included in the main
> > install. You don't need the porting kit with S9.
>
> Does that mean one could, say, install Solaris 9 on a system with
> a GeForce 4 in it (or something else that a sorta-recent XFree86
> release runs on) and have it "just work", preferably through the
> normal kdmconfig way? Or is there still extra hassle involved
> in making things work?
>
> The reason I'm asking is that I have this great dual-processor
> Athlon system that would love to have Solaris on it. (Well,
> if I could ever figure out why the time-of-day stuff seems
> so screwed up -- the Solaris install complains that the battery
> may be dead (which it's not), and then when it gets to the
> point where I should set the date, it just goes into a loop
> where it beeps constantly.)
>
> - Logan
>

Logan:

I know little about the GeForce 4 (I dont own one), but I do know that
installation
of the Solaris Video Porting Kit certainly made the ability to get the CDE
running a
real reality.

Most of the Solaris 9 install on the system I installed it on was very easy
and was a
text mode type install.

Stuart