Set console to VGA on HP-UX running on Itanium 2 (rx2600)

[pakazmir]

Hi,
I've got our group's first Itanium 2 system (a new toy!) and I've just finished installing HP-UX 11i v1.6 upon it.
I figured out all the fun that can be had with consoles and boot devices (use the fan cable console, even if you see the other port labeled console and/or you have a keyboard/mouse/monitor connected to the system ).
I also read another posting which said to get HP-UX to boot up where the startup and shutdown messages go to the monitor rather than console, to run "hpux -vga" at the HPUX> prompt at boot time. Great! And I don't have to run that pesky X now :)
Is there any way to make this choice permanent (so I don't have to manually type hpux -vga every time I reboot the system)? (Would need to be able to switch back to console mode if I needed to...)

Thanks!
Peter

[Massimo Bianchi]

Hi,
if i understand well your question, you have simply to put the correct strings in the lif, like


mkboot -a "hpux -vga -lq (;0)/stand/vmunix" /dev/dsk/cXtYdZ.


You can check it with
"lifcp /dev/dsk/cXtYdZ:AUTO -"

If this answer your question, remember to change the LIF string also on your mirror boot disk.


HTH,
Massimo

[pakazmir]

Is that a hp-ux command-line command, or an EFI command?

-Peter

[John Payne_2]

HPUX command line.

Hope it helps
John

[Mike Stroyan · Accepted solution]

look at man mkboot and man efi. For itanium systems the boot area is efi instead of lif. That means that mkboot needs a -e option. It also means that you need efi commands like efi_ls instead of lif commands like lifls. The autoboot file for HP-UX is in /EFI/HPUX/auto .
The mkboot -e mode writes the efi files from /usr/lib/efi, including the autoboot file from /usr/lib/efi/EFI/HPUX/AUTO .

[pakazmir]

Actually, what I ended up doing (because mkboot scared me too much ) was stopping the autoboot (so I got to an HPUX> prompt) and replacing the autostart file (which had boot vmunix or something like that) with "hpux -vga" and then continued. It's working great. I suspect that mkboot -e would have ended up doing exactly the same thing...

-Peter