Need Sun Monitor

[Ben Scott]

On 3/15/07, brian karas <brian at karas.net> wrote:
> I've had bad luck with the VGA PC monitors.  They need to be fixed-
> sync or something (IIRC) to deal with the framebuffer cards.

  Well, strictly speaking, I haven't really done much of this myself,
but I've seen it done and been told about it and such, and the
received wisdom was:

  Commercial Unix = Sun, SGI, HP, DEC, etc.

  You can connect a good PC monitor to most commercial Unix hosts,
provided you use the proper adapter cables.  There are different
pin-outs.  There may be some trivial signal conversion involved (can
be done in the cable adapter).  Some commercial Unix hosts want to
query the monitor to get settings, so perhaps there will need to be
something in the adapter cable to "fake" a suitable identification.
But ultimately, a good multi-sync PC monitor can adapt to input it
gets in these case.

  Fixed-frequency monitors have to be fed the proper signal, or they
won't work, or will actively be damaged (possibly to the point of
burning up).  Some very old PC monitors were fixed-frequency.
Fixed-frequency monitors were more common from commercial Unix
vendors, where they could declare one frequency to be The Standard and
that was that.

-- Ben