Alpha woes

[gelinas at zk3.dec.com (Mark Gelinas)]

On Tue, Jun 29, 1999 at 08:59:54AM -0400, Brian Conway wrote:
> Last night my Multia (Alpha series) lost its onboard video card.  I'm
> pretty sure it wasn't heat related, actually. Everything else works and
> the machine will boot fine, but the TGA card is dead.  I attempted to plug
> a Cirrus card into the single PCI slot, and the machine booted, but when
> it got to jumping to the kernel after milo, the video stopped advancing
> (much like when I forget to compile the kernel for the TGA framebuffer).
> I remotely recompiled the kernel without the TGA support, yet the same
> symptoms occur.  Has anyone tried getting another video card of any type
> to work in one of these boxes?  I'd consider buying a new motherboard if I
> could even find one that I could put the 233 mhz chip into.  Help?
> 
> Brian Conway
> dogbert at clue4all.net
> 
Sounds like a problem I had getting an S3 Virge working in my Multia. In my
case both video ports work - I found that when the text stopped advancing, it
was because it was swapping back to TGA. Mine went from S3V on ARC, to TGA on
MILO, back to S3V for use. With the above quirk, the card works fine under
2.0.35, albeit a bit slower than the onboard (not sure why yet).

I haven't tried it yet under the 2.2.x kernels, but I've been told that it
should work so long as I only enable frame buffers in the kernel (ie. don't
also add the TGA). With the TGA compiled into the kernel you'll crash on
boot, getting a register dump.

MarkG
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