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forwarded message from David Mosberger




I sent a message from the show yesterday to David Mosberger.  He's the
guy whose name shows up all over the Linux Alpha docs.  I don't have a
copy of the message I sent (it's on one of the machines at the show).
But, here's his reply (so that people at the show today might have a
chance of getting the alpha's running...


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From: David  Mosberger <davidm@AZStarNet.com>
To: abel@netvision.net.il, axp-list@redhat.com
Subject: Re: Trying to get X & net running on alphastation 255
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 10:51:46 -0700 (MST)

 > Now that I'm looking over this more carefully, it looks like the
 > problem might be that the de4x5 driver is picking up the ethernet
 > interface when in fact (since it's a dc21040), we should be using the
 > tulip driver...  I'll look into this some more...  I think I'll also
 > try tossing in a different ethernet card (a de4x5, since the faq
 > doesn't say that the dc21040 is supported).

No, that would be a waste of time.  The de4x5 is the right driver for
the 21040.  The tulip driver is an alternate driver which is not known
to work on the Alpha (and I don't think there is much reason to port
it either---the de4x5 driver works very well).

Not sure why you're having problems with the driver.  It may be there
is something funky about the interrupt handling in the AS255.  Without
access to an AS255, it's kind of difficult to find out what's going
on.  Maybe somebody else can help?

The one thing you could try is compile a later version of the kernel.
There have been some bug fixes in the PCI code w.r.t. bridge support.
But given that the 255 is touted as an entry-level machine, I doubt
that it contains a PCI bridge.

 > The problem is that X sort of comes up, but the image is completely a
 > mess.  It looks like it's not writing properly to video memory.  The
 > xtga beta v0.0 readme says that only 8 bit X is currently supported,
 > but the X server only comes up when we configure for 24 bits
 > (presumably because the card has 24 bitplanes).  Is this still the
 > case for the beta 0.2 server (which I just downloaded from
 > ftp.digital.com)?  I'm not using the EV5 server.  Should I?  It didn't
 > seem to work at all.  Or do I need to swap video cards?

I think you're out of luck.  Either get an 8 bit TGA, or get some
other PC card (#9 GXE 64 works quite well, for example).  The TGA X
server is much faster, so if you want to impress people, stick with an
8 bit TGA.

	--david

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