multiple video cards
 

ok, got my nice agp card humming away lovely... and i want to add an old pci card to the system just for a framebuffer console. can't see anything around about doing it.. it's been recognised on lspci, and tha card works.. so where would i go from here? ho do a start a console up on it?

u need to edit XF86Config to and put the info about the 2nd video card and monitor, then using the first monitor issue startx --somecommand that will start it on the 2nd monitor. I dont remember the command however... man startx will help i guess...

You should check out the man pages on the XFree86 website they have information on doing that type of thing.

therion, how exactly will setting up X make a console appear??? i don't want to use X. like i said, i want a fb console.

Not sure, i'm not even quite sure why you are doing this when you can toggle through the console with the alt combonations.

Sorry i can't help.

right town, right planet, 4 hours late
 

allt combinations.... now why didn't I think of that? /me is afool...

you really have no idea do you? You've not got a clue what i want to do? so why did you bother posting???? especially as someone else already said virtually the same thing before you. i want to set two monitors up because i want to. i have my reasons and i don't need little kiddies like you who think they actually know something telling me how i'm meant to use my computer. you think i nedd permission from you to do what i want?? just go away. please.

I think the 2.4.17 kernel include support for this if I remember right.. I haven't been able to find much documentation on it.. I know there is a patch for mingetty at:

http://ww.ylabs.com

for multiple monitor support in console mode.. but I'm not sure if the latest version of mingetty distributed with most major Linux releases included this support already or not. But mingetty will do it, just not sure of the syntax.

You may also want to disable scrollback as I've heard this can be an issue. By adding:

append="video:scrollback:0"

to your lilo.conf - or whatever you use.

In addition, you can get the FB utilities, which includes a program called cons2fb, which WILL make a FB console on a second monitor. Get these at:

http://home.tvd.be/cr26864/Linux/fbd...9990802.tar.gz

Then type:

cons2fb /dev/fb1 /dev/tty2

and it should startup your second display.

In any case, maybe this will give you enough info to run with if it does work right off the bat.

Later -

Ryan

annie, are you ok?
 

thanks for that, actually that's *just* about as far as i got, i think the mingetty patch is working, it compiled fine, but still gives an error using fb1. but i'm guessing this is because the old card i'm using can't support a framebuffer? after all it was out of a 486.

I've not been able to really find any info about how a framebuffer device itself is started. I'm guessing it would be initialised automatically, as i can't find anything in particular that configures it, and found just about as much documentation abuot it. so my guess is that it doesn't make the fb1 work as the card is pants.

i tried booting to the pci instead of agp, and could only get it to run in non-fb mode, so i guess that kinda proves my point.

dose anyone know if it would be automatic if it did work?

If I understand your question - yes the FB is initalized automatically by the kernel .. from they way I understand it, it either works... or it doesn't. Since it's an older card, I'd bet money that it just isn't compatible. From the stuff I've read on FB, it can be pretty picky... and I myself have had some mixed results with it.

yeah, think i'll have to write it off really. try and get a better card at some point.

measuring the daffodils
 

kick ass, got it working with X.

bought a new sis 6326 (i.e. a vesa2.0 card) and now got that running blackbox and still with gnome on my geforce. not quite what i wanted, and i can't suss out how to make both WM's load at the same tmie (i don't want xinerama, as it screws with video playback), but in gneneral it's quite cool.

it turns out that the norml vesa framebuffer can only support a single card at one time. and i'm sure there's a way to manually start a second framebuffer, but i can't for the life of me find out how to do it...

Cool, enjoy.

please stop posting for the sake of it.