I thought this question was asked many times before but my search failed to give me a thread that corresponds to my problem.

I have recently bought a Sun workstation on ebay (Sun Ultra 10 Creator 3D, Integrated Video Port). I don't know what kind of video card I got in there. Since I didn't want to spend money on monitor too, I goot a 5$ adapter 13W3M/HD15F so that can run it with a 'regular' svga monitor.

No such luck! Neither of my two monitors ( a new MAG Inovision 17" model 786N or old Digital Research Technologies model YEO711-03) shows anything when plugged into the workstation except confirm that the monitor is working properly.

Is there anything I can do here to make this work? Adjust refresh rate or some other trick? I really believe that at least the newer monitor should be able to handle this pretty old workstation.

Thanks.

The output on those suns really needs some very nice ultrasync-type monitors. I have an ultra5, but I was lucky and it has the VGA output. A lot of the cheaper adaptors don't work too well. I've heard there are some expensive ($60) adaptors that do more than rearrange pins but also do something to the signal, but I can't confirm or deny that.

Do you not see anything, even during the OBP?

What does OBP mean?
I do see some fast moving horizontal lines on the older monitor.

I googled and found out that my monitor res. has to be exactly 1152x900 with 66Hz vertical refresh rate in order for me to see the boot. Supposedly I can change this defaults later. Now my question is if it is possible to adjust monitor to exactly those specifics?

My newer monitor can go all the way up to 1200x1600, but the closest mode to the one I need (as listed in WinXP Display settings) is 1152x864 which doesn't seem to be good enough. Also the vertical refresh rate can be set to 60 or 75Hz. Nothing in between. Is there nothing I can do about this? Maybe throuhg my Slack box?

MultiSync monitors can hit those frequencies because they do not sync at discrete intervals. It's in the way the monitor is constructed.

OBP is the OpenBootProm (Sun equivalent of BIOS, but on steroids)

Well, this "pretty old workstation" is perhaps configured at 1920x1200 and maybe your monitor can't handle that.

man ffbconfig (I guess) will help you tune it.

Jlliagre,

Forgive me for asking, but how am I supposed to run man if I can't get anything on the screen?

I was wondering that myself.

All solaris manual pages are available from docs.sun.net

You can also connect to your workstation through a serial line or the network.

Be creative

Can you connect via network with no OS installed? (Just curious myself)

Well, the open poster does not state no O/S is installed.

Anyway, remote console connection can be done to an uninstalled Solaris machine through a network terminal server.
Depending on the machine (but not on the U10), this terminal server is actually inside the Sun box, on the NIC, so you can enter the OpenBoot Prom prompt (enhanced "BIOS") remotely. You can power-on/power-off the machine from this link, and even access it in case of power outage ...

The adapter I'm using cost about $250 back about 3-4 years ago and also converts PS/2 mouse/keyboard into Sun "serial bus" or whatever they call it. Works great. My old ViewSonic 15g (from early to mid 90's) handles the 1152x900 (I thought it was 864 though) just fine with that.

If you have a serial cable you can connect to the sparc box using a windows machine and hyperterminal. Settings for the com port need to be 9600 n,8,1.
this will allow you to see the open boot
once there you can install the solaris operating system, log in and configure the machine.
It is a bit difficult to install over hyperterm since the display size for hyperterm is a bit smaller than what is displayed by solaris during install, but it is not impossible.