unsigned long geek = random();

Yesterday I finally got around to adding a second head and setting up Xinerama on my dual Creator3D Sun Ultra 60 running NetBSD/sparc64 -current (4.99.4). Setup was fairly straighforward – I started with a fresh XF86Config generated by X -configure and added the necessary stanzas for the second video card and monitor.

The only slight problem I had was a missing fb1 node in /dev, with the result that XFree86 didn’t even find the second card. After much hair-pulling, I realised what the problem was and ran MAKEDEV std_sparc64 in /dev to fix it. The reason for the missing device node was that my machine had been upgraded from 3.1 to -current and I had neglected to update /dev during the upgrade. Oh well, all’s well that ends well

Dual Creator3Ds are only supported by 4.0 and later – if you try and boot 3.1 and earlier on a machine with a pair of them, you may find your console “disappearing” when the second card is initalised. To get around that, remove the second card, upgrade and then reinstall the card.

Some useful resources:

• My working XF86Config
• The Sun Frame Buffer FAQ
• A guide to setting Sun frame buffer resolution

Update: fixed the broken link to my XF86Config

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the past few months about Xgl, the X server architecture layered on OpenGL. Although still in the early stages of development, some code has been released and there are numerous guides explaining how to get Xgl running on a Linux system (the Gentoo Wiki has a good run down of what to do).

Until quite recently, Xgl was only supported on machines that could use the proprietary ATI or NVidia X drivers, which excluded me, as my laptop has an Intel 915DM display subsystem (one of those horrible shared memory systems). This has since changed and the 915DM is now supported. Rather fortuitously, today Jonathan kindly passed along a copy of the latest Gentoo-based Kororaa Xgl Live CD 0.2. When I booted it on my laptop, I was very impressed with what I saw – the performance was good (much better than, for example, the composite extension of X.org 6.9, as I’m using currently) and the eye candy certainly is purrty

As part of my ongoing project to get XFree86 working on a NetBSD/alpha system with a commodity PCI video card, I need to do a native build of XFree86. PR 29882 explains why the XFree86 X server is not included by default in the NetBSD release engineering releases, hence the need for my native build.

One slight potential fly in the ointment is that all my NetBSD source trees are stored on my source server and mounted read-only via NFS on the systems that need it. To build XFree86 with a read-only source tree requires a little trickery, but the procedure is nicely explained in the Building XFree86 from a Source Distribution guide (see page 3 onwards). The idea is to create a shadow tree containing symlinks to all the files in the original tree and using that to build instead of the original tree. It’s quick to set up and works very well.

Now to get a decent PCI video card…

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about XFree86 on NetBSD/alpha, I was pointed in the direction of these two very useful references:

• Digital AlphaServer XFree86 Code
• Tested Good Video cards

It seems like a lot of commodity PCI video cards Just Work(tm) with XFree86 in Alpha systems, but just for safety’s sake I think I’ll stick with one of the known good cards. PCI Radeon 7000s can apparently be had for R300 (about $45) from a local computer reseller – I’ll go and check them out tomorrow and probably pick one up. Getting the card locally will probably cost the same as eBaying one, but it’ll certainly be a lot quicker.

While updating my NetBSD-current source tree, I noticed that X.Org has been imported. Looks like the migration from XFree86 has begun…

Yesterday I discovered a neat piece of software to complement my Fluxbox desktop – fluxter. It’s a pager that’s faster than bbpager, can be embedded in the slit and tracks the style of the current theme.

I’ve commited a package to pkgsrc-wip.