[9fans] Venti and Video questions

[9fans] Venti and Video questions

[Leonardo Valencia]

Greetings Plan9 community, as a follow up to my previous successful 
install of the OS under Linux/Qemu, I now managed to install it in a 
real computer (an old HP Vectra). But here is where the questions start 
pouring.

First, my fossil+venti system gives me an "error 2" every time I boot 
the machine (the message is about the arena being more recent than the 
last write time). The machine boots fine after that but the message is 
annoying and I am afraid it can indicate something more serious. Any 
advice on how to get rid of it is greatly appreciated.

Second, my HP Vectra comes with a Matrox G200 video card, but the 
1024x768x32 mode has never worked on it (not even under Linux or any 
other OS) and running it on 8 bits mode is horrible, so I modified the 
mga4xx.c driver to support 16 and 24 bpp modes in addition to the 
original ones. The results were mixed: the 24 bpp mode works like a 
charm with a multisync monitor, however the 16 bpp mode has the wrong 
palette (kind of psychedelic). So any information on what should be the 
correct palette for that card in 16bpp mode is appreciated too.

Finally, some advice for anyone that wants to install the OS in a HP 
Vectra, make sure to disable the PnP OS support in the BIOS, otherwise 
plan9 hangs forever just after the cpu message when trying to detect a 
Network Card.

Again, any help is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

-Leonardo Valencia

Re: [9fans] Venti and Video questions

[csant]

> First, my fossil+venti system gives me an "error 2" every time I boot  
> the machine (the message is about the arena being more recent than the  
> last write time). The machine boots fine after that but the message is  
> annoying and I am afraid it can indicate something more serious. Any  
> advice on how to get rid of it is greatly appreciated.

Are you also getting some error like
	ndb/dns: cannot read my ip address
printed at boot? I had the same issue - venti stopped complaining when I  
managed to get the machine resolve ip addresses :) (does it do some  
timesync'ing?). To do that, I needed to comment out some if tests for  
network in termrc, so that my termrc simply was running:
	ip/ipconfig >/dev/null >[2=1]
	ndb/dns -rf $NDBFILE

(see details in some mails a few weeks ago). You'll of course need to  
configure your network properly.
/c

Re: [9fans] Venti and Video questions

[Leonardo Valencia]

csant wrote:
> Are you also getting some error like
>     ndb/dns: cannot read my ip address
> printed at boot? I had the same issue - venti stopped complaining when 
> I  managed to get the machine resolve ip addresses :) (does it do some  
> timesync'ing?). To do that, I needed to comment out some if tests for  
> network in termrc, so that my termrc simply was running:
>     ip/ipconfig >/dev/null >[2=1]
>     ndb/dns -rf $NDBFILE
> 
> (see details in some mails a few weeks ago). You'll of course need to  
> configure your network properly.
> /c
> 


Hello, sorry for the belated response to your advice, it works fine now 
thank you, perhaps a combination of setting the IP information at the 
start and also letting the machine ran for couple days. Venti now works 
fine for me, and I must say, having access to archival data and 
snapshots at will is beyond cool.

Regards,

-Leonardo Valencia