[rescue] I got a new Octane! Why can't I talk to it?

[jodys at helluin.org]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 09:35:41AM -0500, Micah R Ledbetter wrote:
> Really? I thought the adapter was supposed to work with all of the  
> vendors. Hrm.

It's a conspiracy to make you buy special adapters...

> Hmm. When you say that it shouldn't affect anything, does that mean  
> just during boot, or even after, when I boot up into the graphical  
> environment, it will still work?

As a later poster indicates, IRIX will default to 1280x1024 at 60hz if it
gets nothing on the monitor ID pins. It's easy enough to use xsetmon or
setmon to get a more preferable resolution/refresh once your are in IRIX. 
I believe that the SGI prom uses 1280x1024 at 60hz regardless of any other
settings, but I can't verify that right now.

If you can see the output from the PROM during boot, then you are
golden. It's possible that IRIX will set the graphics to something
incompatible with your monitor, but this will only happen *after* you've
seen the POST. Aside from the obvious problem of the IRIX telling the
graphics to output a signal with a out of range pixel clock, it's
possible that the sync is wrong. This is extremely unlikely, but 
some of the graphics options can be set for some pretty strange schemes 
(Sync on Red!?). To fix this boot into single user mode and issue

# /usr/gfx/setmon -x 1280x1024_60

and reboot the system. After that you can use xsetmon in Irix to fiddle
with settings, if you like.

> Alright. I switched them around. It wasn't really obvious from the  
> icons which port was which, but I didn't have good light back there.

I'm sorry, I may have got that backwards. From the manual, if you face
the back of the machine the keyboard is the *outermost* port and the 
mouse is the innermost (closest to the power supply fan). I believe the
PROM will indicate an error if things are connected wrong.

Good luck!

Jody