Booting Linux Debian 7.1 on a Blade 2500 SPARC workstation
 

Hi,

I have a Sun Blade 2500 SPARC workstation with a XVR-100 framebuffer (video card) plugged into a Sun brand 21 inch monitor, and I try to run Linux Debian 7.1 on it... The problem is that when I boot I see the first few lines, but at one point very soon in the booting process when the resolution change and the two penguins usually appear the screen go blank and the monitor close... I managed to find that the problem is the screen resolution, apparently the monitor or video card doesn't support the resolution the kernel try to switch to and thus the monitor goes into sleep mode...

A useful thing to say might be that my XVR-1200 framebuffer doesn't show that problem, but since that videocard is not supported by Xorg I need to use the SVR-100... Also Linux Debian 6.0 and 7.0 also show that behavior...

I would like to know how I could change the resolution Debian or the kernel use at boot time?

Thanks in advance

Dear happymonkey:
I am not absolutely sure if I am taking you in the right direction, but if you don't have something better try this:

Try to split the loging console from the Graphic User Interfase, so that it boot in VGA mode.
Then start the GUI via startx or other appropiate command.
If it was a problem about xorg.conf, then you will see it.
At least you should have a correct boot.
Then change the xorg.conf or whatever configuration file you have, accordingly.

Regards.

Alejandro

Hi,

Thanks for the answer, but it haven't solved my issue... The switch to graphical mode in console soon during the booting process is seemingly a relatively new behavior in Linux, and it have nothing to do with Xorg... There's a parameter "nomodeset" that can apparently be passed to the kernel as parameter but I don't know how to do that when using SPARC, in any case I tried it in different way and it didn't work... I kind of put that on the ice, in the meantime I use Debian 6.0.7 whom I managed to get working...

Wonder if booting to vesa would fix it long enough to diag it more?

That card ought to support vesa 2.

I had a similar problem on a relative new piece of gear. It turned out that the video driver was flawed for my particular device. Gotta look it up at home to be more specific. But like jefro said it was something with vesa. Gonna give more detail how I solved it in 9 hours. Oh work.

Just for the way how I solved it was to ssh into the box and see what was going on. Checking dmesg and a like.