I am about to install Red Hat 9 on an old Compaq Proliant 6000. The video is apparently Cirrus Logic GD 5430/40 Alpine rev 22.
The info I have found indicates that that has only 1 meg of memory.

Is there a command I can run to discover the amount of video memory?
The machine currently has Red Hat 7 which is not running X (and which will simply be reformatted) and I looked at /proc/pci and also tried lspci -v, but there's no info in there about the amount of video memory.

Will startx run with 1MB of video memory?

According to the Compaq site, this video card should do 1024x768 at 256 colors (of course they must be talking about windows ). This machine will be a server for some test stuff and probably won't really need X, but I would like to have it if possible.

Thanks for any input.

I would say it could run X, might be slow and or choppy bad resolution with the latest and greatest. I'd suggest you may want to make a larger swap partition or such, just in case if your running with one under 125 megs or so, etc.

Not sure of any particular command that will tell you video memory. Might be in a description pulled from lspci or dmesg or the such...

Well, got it to work. Red Hat 9.0 recognized the GD 5430. I startx'ed and can run at 800x600 x 256 colors. Slow but usable. But hey, it won't be used for any graphical production stuff anyway.

Man, that old Proliant is the size of one of those mini refrigerators. Two 200Mhz Pentium Pro processors, 4x4GB SCSI drives, 1Mb video memory, 128MB memory... Probably some machine back in it's day.

istsjustme

did you have to do anything special to get RH9 to install on your 'fridge? Having some problems with some other old Compaq appliances in thread

"Compaq ProLiant 5000 RedHat 9 Installation Problems"

Any insight?