Ultra 10

From Grokdoc

There is a gotcha on configuring XFree86 on Ultra 10s of which one ought to be aware. In the post-installation configuration, the installation script presents a dialog to select and provide details on the monitor and video card. Be careful because during hardware detection the script can make the wrong decisions. If the device in the fb0 slot (the first framebuffer) is not the actual video card (say, an ATI Mach64), but rather it is either the Elite3D or Creator3D framebuffer, then it is imperative to select the Elite3D or Creator3D rather than the hardware card.

The problem is many configuration scripts probe the system for its hardware, find the hardware card, and decide it is the one to use. However, since something else is in the fb0 slot, which is the one XFree86 looks for by default, the X Window System becomes confused. All that appears when the window system starts up is a blank screen. The log file (/var/log/XFree86.log or something similar) will sometimes give a "No screens detected" error message at the very end, though not necessarily. Debian, Gentoo, and perhaps other distributions do not provide the option to select and configure the Elite3D or Creator3D so one will have to manually configure XFree86. Aurora Linux does, however.

Configuring fb0 to point to the hardware video card instead of Elite3D or Creator3D would obviate this problem. There are advantages (namely performance) to doing this and is worth looking into.

Another gotcha is that by default the microcode to achieve full hardware graphics acceleration is not loaded under linux (it is part of the Solaris distribution). However, the microcode ("afb.ucode" - search for it on Google) can be loaded using the "afbinit" program under linux. It shoud be configured to run by a startup script before XFree86 tries to start.