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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
