Eliminate Splash screen and bring up console

OK, we have a system whose BIOS displays a splash screen during booting, and
normally we startup Photon, the graphics driver, and our Photon application.
Works just fine.

What we want to be able to do (via the altboot feature) is to go normal
console mode. How can I force the PC’s graphics chip to go from the splash
screen to normal console mode. Under QNX4, I simply started the graphics
driver, and then killed it (or something similar to that, my memory is
fuzzy). Is there anything simple to do this? I know that in all reality I
simply need to make a simple int 10h call and set the mode to 3 (or maybe
7), but do I really need to write my own application (and would it work
within QNX 6.2). I really want something as simple as possible.

Thanks
Bill Faulkner

William Faulkner <wdf@mac.com> wrote:

OK, we have a system whose BIOS displays a splash screen during booting, and
normally we startup Photon, the graphics driver, and our Photon application.
Works just fine.

What we want to be able to do (via the altboot feature) is to go normal
console mode. How can I force the PC’s graphics chip to go from the splash
screen to normal console mode. Under QNX4, I simply started the graphics
driver, and then killed it (or something similar to that, my memory is
fuzzy). Is there anything simple to do this? I know that in all reality I
simply need to make a simple int 10h call and set the mode to 3 (or maybe
7), but do I really need to write my own application (and would it work
within QNX 6.2). I really want something as simple as possible.

Under QNX6, if you’re using a full install, a bunch of shell scripts
are run.

Eventually, they look for the existence of /etc/system/config/nophoton
and if it exists, they don’t run photon, but instead run in text mode.

This test is done in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

I don’t know if there is a generic way to tell that you’ve been booted
from a .altboot, as there was under QNX4, but you should be able to
export an environment variable in the buildfile, and modify (say) the
rc.sysinit to look at this.

-David

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