On Saturday 13 September 2003 08:01 am, Maciej Matysiak wrote: > hello, > > i've just installed debian on my newly purchased toy - the > digital alpha personal workstation 600au (it just appeared to > be the cheapest reasonable alternative to i386 hardware :)). > so, now i have decent hardware and system. > > but, after some googling and browsing through various > documents, i can see that there's almost no support for the > graphic card i have in that box - quite impressively looking > [1] one: the intergraph powerstorm 4d40t. it's based on cirrus > logic gd5440 chip and i can't find almost any information > about running xfree86 or framebuffer on it.
Hmmm. First of all, to the best of my knowledge, XFree86 4.x prior to 4.3 does NOT build its cirrus logic drivers (unless someone knows of some obscure patch I've missed). Not sure why. I'm guessing they just weren't ported at the time. XFree86 4.3.0, OTOH, actually builds the cirrus logic drivers. Second of all, I remember getting that vidcard working on an x86 box long ago. It was integrated onto a Trenton single-board computer with a Pentium-MMX 233. I had to set "noaccel" on it back then, though, and it was XFree86 3.3.x--but at least we have evidence that the card is indeed supported on some platforms. Third, that thing looks like more than just a vidcard. That's probably why it's so huge! It's a combo card, with the Cirrus card as a stacked daughtercard--I see SCSI and network components on the baseboard. I'm not sure if you can just pull off the Cirrus daugtercard and still have the rest work--and replacing all the other stuff is liable to be a bit of a problem. If you do end up having to replace the entire baseboard, I've got a spare SymBIOS 53c810 SCSI controller and a spare half-duplex 10/100 Tulip NIC. They came out of my LX164 box, so I know they work on Alpha. If the disks in your box are differential (HVD), I also have a spare QLogic QLA1040 UW HVD controller pulled from the LX164 box. When I got my LX164, I basically switched out all the peripherals for better ones--the Tulip NIC for an eepro100, the SCSI cards for a 2940UW, and the vidcard for a Radeon 7500. The old vidcard (S3 Trio64 POS) had problems working with XFree86, so you probably don't want that. -- Kelledin "If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does it still cost four figures to fix?"
