SOLVED: RE: Voyager framebuffer?

I figured out what's going on.  

I finally cracked open the case (which, by the way, isn't hard if you have the Service Manual, which is available online).  I checked out the framebuffer and... it's the color version!  So I had a color framebuffer talking to a monochrome screen, which (a) I'm surprised worked at all and (b) I'm even more surprised came up with what I'm guessing was a composite ID for the display, BWTHREE (a combination of BW and CGTHREE?).  

When I got the device originally, the backlight in the screen was bad.  I found another screen on eBay, and for some reason simply assumed the unit was monochrome - I don't recall what led me to that obviously erroneous conclusion.  

Is there anyone out there who has a monochrome framebuffer card and wants a color one?  Or is there anyone with a spare color screen who might part with it?  Thanks -- Ian 
________________________________________
From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ian King [[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 11:17 AM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: [Suns-at-Home] Voyager framebuffer?

Hello all,

I'm new to the list.  I have a working Sparcstation Voyager, but I did not get the original distribution disk with it.  When I originally got the machine, it had a NetBSD install (as well as a broken backlight and a bad NVRAM chip, which I've replaced).  That didn't provide the GUI, so I tried installing Solaris 2.6 - which didn't do it either.  (I also tried reinstalling NetBSD.)  Under both operating systems, at boot I get a message about "can't find the framebuffer."  OpenBoot tells me that the video hardware is 'bwthree' and the closest name I can find on the 2.6 install media is bwtwo.  As an experiment, I tried renaming bwtwo to bwthree and placing it in the /platform/sun4m/kernel/drv directory - no go, same error message.

My first choice would be to install the original software on the machine, if it exists anywhere.  It would, of course, be wonderful to find the original installation media, but I don't mind having to piece together a system.  Does anyone have any guidance for me?  Thanks -- Ian

A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.

Ian S. King, Sr. Vintage Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
A project of Vulcan, Inc.
http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org


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