Miscellaneous graphics and network config issues

One of those classic statements made by an early Computer designer went
something like “some day there may be a need for as many as 5 computers
in the world”. I saw a recent take on this saying “and we now know that
he overestimated by 4”.

I am intrigued by QNX’s ability to (almost) seamlessly integrate
different nodes into a single network multiprocessor machine. One day,
I’m going to do that photon demo where you move the mouse and it leaves
one screen and continues across the next screen over. Anyway, as part of
my learning curve, am busy installing it on every piece of (old)
hardware I have lying around (with phenomenal success, I might add),
which is partly justification for some of the questions below, and
partly to deflect answers that would see me accumulate more old hardware
:slight_smile:

Ok, the questions …

I have several old monitors (e.g. MicroScan 2E/ADI, Nec Multisync II)
that can do 1024x768 just fine, but need to do it interlaced. Can anyone
point me at the the Photon equivalent of the XF86Config file, where I
can select or jimmy the mode, and/or any docs that suggest just what
form the jimmying should take? The default autoconfig is trying to run
them at 60Hz non-interlaced.

What are several gotchas/good reasons for not running a VGA screen
(640x480). This is for an old notebook. I can probably run a sliding
window here which bypasses hard limitations but is awkward/user
unfriendly. Can/how does one configure Photon to do this (docs pointer
is fine)? What does one do on a Palm or BlackBerry screen which I can
see turning into really neat game/appliance controllers one day?

The phpoly screen saver seems to come with sound effects - when it
starts up my speakers do a model airplane imitation. Is this by design?
and can I turn it off? This is with an Ensoniq/Creative PCI soundcard,
i.e. more or less generic SB type, an ATI Rage II+ on a DFI K6BV3
motherboard. It goes without saying that the other 5 OSes on that
machine don’t do this with any of their screensavers.

I saw there were a number of exchanges about WD/SMC netcards a while
back with a suggestion that fixing the current broken devn-wd on the CD
(i.e. symbol lookup failure) might happen one day. Has that day arrived?
The WD8003/13/33, Elite16 share the same basic core as the NE2000 (8390,
right) so it doesn’t seem that it would be too hard to patch things
together. Is the driver source code open source, and if so where is it?
Is there a standard QNX driver wrapper for Linux drivers (which would be
a really neat way to leverage a lot of code until a native QNX port
could be done)?

I also would like to second Sylvain’s request for FTP access to download
Patch B and other package updates. CD’s and floppies may have low
latency, but they have very high bandwidth compared to (multiple) WWW
download!

Thanks for any bootstrapping assistance!

Cheers,
RossW

Ross Wetmore
rwetmore@sympatico.ca