[parisc-linux] framebuffer depth and other issues ...

[Nahkola Mikko <mikko.nahkola@nokia.com>]

I was wondering ... the VIS-EG is about as close to "fully supported" as 
they get, right?

Well, I have one of those in a C240 and ... well, the system is otherwise 
just fine, even KDE is fairly responsive and all that, but there's a 
shortage of available colors. (anyone know of a good lowcolor icon theme? 
I can't seem to find such in Debian... anyone?)

Is it possible to get more than 8 bpp out of a VIS-EG? How would I go 
about that, do I need to say something like "stifb:bpp:foo" to the kernel 
or is fbset enough?

How much of a difference is there between VIS-EG/PCI (A4977A) and 
VIS-EG/GSC (A4450A) in this regard? I have an A4450A in there at the 
moment.

HP-UX seems to find a whole lot of differences and such ... and I did run 
GNOME/HP-UX once on a VIS-EG/PCI without running out of colors but then 
again HP-UX does color recovery and acceleration and all that on those...


Then, is an Ati Mach64 likely to work? I mean, it should be pretty 
well-supported in i386 ... and I've heard rumors about Sun-branded 
Mach64s too, so that would point to least some models getting by without 
a PC BIOS.


Third, what's the thing with $TERM and the serial console? I have 
interesting problems with the 70096, even in vt100-emulation mode the 
Debian installer was, um, interesting. Doesn't anyone else want to use 
the HP dumb-terminal hardware with Linux?


And as an aside, how reliable is the disk stuff nowadays? Would it make 
any sense to run a file server on Linux/hppa yet? I mean, something like 
a stack of A3312As, software-RAID and NFS ... is it likely to work? How 
about performance, compared to HP-UX, for example? (yes, I'd expect HP-UX 
to be somewhat better, but by how much?)


-- 
Mikko Nahkola <mikko.nahkola@nokia.com>