*BSD News Article 76894


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From: Jim Durham <durham@w2xo.pgh.pa.us>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Support for fixed-scan monitors
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 1996 21:57:37 -0400
Organization: Dis-
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I've had this little annoyance for a while, and recently became aware
that others did also...namely, I have a large monitor (19 inch) that
is representative of many available surplus, etc, that are relatively
high resolution and support scan rates like 1024 X 900 or so, but do
not support 640 x 480 (standard VGA) resolution. The only way to use
them with FreeBSD is to set up the proper scan rates in the XF86Config 
file and run them under X11.

The major drawback to this is that you can't see boot messages, which
are in 640x480 scan, and you can't use the virtual terminals. X works
just fine. If Ihave problems and X won't come up, I have to dig
out the old VGA 12 incher and plug it in to see what I'm doing.
This is not good!

I poked around through syscons.c, looking for where the VGA card gets
initialized to 640x480, and realized that it probably is just leaving
it the way the bios set it up during the system bootstrap.

Has anyone played with this or have any info?  Obviously, the virtual
terminals work in 640x480, and must reset the VGA card resolution when
you hit ALT-whatever, so I must be missing something in syscons.c.

???

-Jim Durham