X11 Questions on Sparc U60

[geonjay]

Hello fellas,

I've recently inherited several U60s (failed NetMon project...hehehe, but I was the benefactor!!) Some are dual proc, some are not. I have ran Solaris and *nix's for a few years...I'm by no means an expert, but like many I am a tinkerer.

Now for the meat. I wanna try out Gentoo on sparc. So I got the LiveCD, setup to use Sparc64 when possible. Here's the OPTs from my make.conf

CFLAGS="-O3 -mcpu=ultrasparc -mtune=ultrasparc -pipe"
CHOST="sparc-unknown-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -mcpu=ultrasparc -mtune=ultrasparc -pipe"

MAKEOPTS="-j3"

I will occassionaly add -m64, but rarely. The machine on which I am experimenting has an Elite3D, dual processor, 512Mb, and plenty of disk space. I have used emerge to install 2.6.9 and xorg-6.8.0-r3. I was unable to get X11 to load. My screen blanks, then see the basic X desktop (gray screen, X-mouse in the middle). Nothing else happens and I can't move the mouse...now the INTERESTING part is that there is no X server running. I can do a ps -ax and the last running process is my -bash shell. It's like the framebuffer has a frozen image...and since X isn't running I can't ctrl-alt-bkspc to get out. I will be logged in as root on tty1 and as a normal user on tty2, and tty2 is the terminal that I use to start X with. After the "startx" trial not only is the console frozen, but "agetty" is no longer running on tty1 or 2. I can get back into the system via SSH to verify that agetty is no longer running...but I can't get it to start back manually. Also, the CapsLock and NumLock LEDs don't light up when the buttons are pressed. The only remedy is to reboot. I have tried upgrading to 6.8.0-r4...it still doesn't work and the symptoms are slightly different. The console still blanks and locks, but I don't see the X background this time. My X-log looks MUCH more successful then it did with -r3, but still fails at the end with a Signal 11.

Now the question. Before I start posting my xorg.conf (yes, I emerged xorg with dlloader, and uncommented cfb and cfb32) and my logs I just wanna ask ---- Should I just go back to something simpler? 2.4 kernel with -r3? I was wanting to run 2.6 for the preemptivity (is that word?) this system will be the human interface for the IDS I'm setting up.

I GREATLY appreciate your help...I've tried to read all pertinent posts, but even after following the advice I can't seem to make it work.

[Ferris]

With an Elite card, you also need the microcode for it. Since you are also running Solaris, all you need to do is:

• Get a copy of /usr/lib/afb.ucode from a Solaris system (and put it in /usr/lib);
  
• Or, get the microcode by going to
  http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=patches/patch-access
  and asking for patch 108604, then add the microcode to /usr/lib;
  
• emerge afbinit (if you haven't already);
  
• rc-update add afbinit default
  
• Or, to test, /etc/init.d/afbinit start (then try starting X again).
  

Hope this helps.

[spam_]