A4331A monitor for Caldera Linux 2.3

[David Novice]

I'm trying to get linux working on my HP Kayak XA PC Workstation with an HP
A4331A monitor. It's very blurry.
SuperProbe returns that it's a Matrox G200 (?#!?)
XF86Setup runs but I don't know what to set anything to. I've tried various
configurations but nothing seems to change. Could somebody tell me exactly what
to do ? Thanks.

[Tim Prince_1]

I think your question is more relevant to the video adapter rather than the
monitor. I set up my Kayak using Lizard, with quite a bit of trial and error.
My Kayak has the special 2-slot 16MB HP AGP adapter. In the absence of a
driver for this (as verified by HP support), linux (as with Windows 2000) will
see only the embedded single slot video adapter (which should be identified
correctly by brand name and model; I don't know if the G200 is one which HP
uses) and the much smaller on-board video memory. When I instruct Lizard to
probe for the size of the video RAM, it comes up with 1MB and bases its
recommendations on this. According to my experience, if your specific HP
monitor is not on the list, a generic monitor choice should be taken. The
highest recommended resolutions can be eliminated, as the test display is
unsatisfactory. Just below this level of resolution, there are choices which
appear satisfactory on the test display but fail when installed in linux. In
the end, the best I could do was a 1
024x768 8-bit color display at the lowest available refresh rate. For
comparison, W2K is able to run the single slot video at one step higher
resolution and refresh rate. Neither linux nor W2K completely fill the screen.
If you must fall back on XF86setup, you should of course set up a range of
resolutions starting with 800x600 8-bit color so you can check results at
various settings.

[David Novice]

Thanks for the reply. Please help me a bit more:
How do I run lizard?
I'm not sure what is meant by 'fall back on XF86Setup', but I've been
attempting to use it since I know how to start it. However, it doesn't seem to
make a bit of difference what I set there, even if I put 8bpp, 800x600. Any
idea what I'm doing wrong?

[Tim Prince_1]

As Lizard is the fancy gui installer which you get automatically when you
install from Caldera CD (maybe now from others as well) I haven't had to think
about how to get there. In fact, there may not be any way to run it as a
partial re-installer (i.e. it reformats your linux partitions). As it is one
of the main selling points of Caldera and usually saves a lot of time when you
don't know the exact parameters for your video, I do think of xf86setup as a
fall back position in case of Lizard failure. That does of course have the
virtue of working the same no matter which distribution you have, provided that
you have a recent enough server of your choice. I haven't run it since I
started using Caldera, so I'm rusty. You do need for sure to know the exact
parameters of your video card and monitor, some of which can be looked up on
line, as can a list of which video server goes with which card, none of these
answers being intuitively obvious (e.g. some S3 work with S3 server, some with
SVGA). As I said, if
your HP does in fact have a G200, my experience installing on an HP with
embedded Cirrus board and A4576A monitor won't take you all the way.

[Chuck Slivkoff]

The Matrox G200 graphics card is supported by the current SVGA X server. The
configuration should be straight forward. The OpenLinux "Getting Started Guide"
includes instructions to configure the X server.

http://www.calderasystems.com/images/pdf/GSG_2.3English.pdf

The instructions assume that you are newly installing. You should be able to
run "lizardx" to configure the X server after the system has been installed.

The A4331D monitor supports multiple resolutions up to 1280x1024 @ 75Hz. The
image depth will depend upon availability of RAM on your graphics adapter.