Frank Van Damme wrote: > > Hello, > > I recently bought an old sparc station 2 ... terrible waste of a good > monitor. So I thought about buying an adaptor (it's got a 13W3 connector) and > attaching the thing my somewhat-beefier PC. ...
I've had one of those in service (on various Windows boxes) for several years using a Gemini C1 video card (uses Tseng 6000) from www.si87.com. Works beautifully, including handling the BIOS messages right. 640x480, readable at 10 yards. There are Linux and FreeBSD drivers for some of their cards, for example: http://www.si87.com/Support/satlinux.html Here's an old post of mine on a similar monitor. I never tried getting my pair (an HP as described and one from NCD that's the same Hitachi product with a different OEM label) going under Linux, but a URL in the post gives info on that. I've since sold them and the buyer had no trouble bringing them up on Linux. I can get details if anyone needs them. old post: I've just tried an experiment using a bunch of spare parts I had around: HP c2746a 20 inch monitor, off an old server (HP 715?) ATI mach 64 PCI card (mine's the VT model; I don't know if that matters) VGA-to-5-BNC cable I plugged them into a 98 box with an AGP card as primary video adapter, fiddled a bit and bingo! Dual monitors with minimal sweat. If I'd had to buy the parts, my cost for the lot would have been about $120 Canadian, equivalent to about $90 US. Seems like an awfully good deal. Details on these monitors, including info for setting them up on Linux are at: http://freeweb.pdq.net/jcooper/c2746a.htm For 98, I just told it I had a generic monitor capable of 1280*1024 @ 75 Hz. It then gave me a menu of refresh rates. I'm using 1152*864 @75 Hz. That is the higehest resolution you can use with 16-bit colour on a 2 meg card and I find it quite readable. 1280 by 1024 works at the "adapter default" refresh rate. Just telling Windows you have a 1600*1200 monitor does not work, but the HP behaves nicely, puts itself into a power-down state when it sees signals it dislikes. My guess is these monitors would be available almost anywhere (they were a common HP part) and that the same trick would work with other monitors. Sun, SGI, other HP, ... Many of these won't work as primary monitor on a PC (barring expensive adapters or clever tricks) because they only run at one set of frequencies (or a limited range) and cannot do "standard" VGA. They therefore tend to be dirt cheap on the surplus market. $50 Canadian in my area. YMMV. As a second monitor, though, they are happy. I've rebooted the machine in Linux. No problem. By default, it just sees the primary monitor. The HP sees no signal, goes politely into a power-save mode. I don't yet know if I can get the multi-screen stuff in Linux. Has anyone on the list tried 98 with three monitors? I'm contemplating getting another of these. Two 20" HP's flanking my 19" Viewsonic... Run 98 on the desktop, VNC to Linux servers ... _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
