[rescue] Graphics on a E450

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Sun, 2 Nov 2025, Dave McGuire via rescue wrote:

> > I received a decommissioned E450 from work. I don't see a frame buffer 
> > in it, so I guess it ran headless. The E450 falls into a gap in my 
> > experience with Sun (I left the first time in '97 and came back in '03). 
> > What graphics is supported and how does it compare to SS20 graphics? The 
> > System Handbook lists PGX, PGX32, PGX64, and Expert3D but I hadn't heard 
> > of any of those before I looked at that list.
> 
>    It can definitely be done, but I'd have to wonder why one would want 
> that on a machine that is very clearly a server.  I've worked with a lot 
> of E450s at a lot of sites, but I don't think I've ever seen one with a 
> framebuffer, so clearly I'm not the only person with that opinion.

 Possibly just to be able to hook up a keyboard and monitor rather than 
having to obtain a proper serial terminal device just to get occasional 
access to the console.  Perfectly reasonable for a small site run with a 
single server only and I'm fairly sure it was an E450 that had a video 
console as delivered at the site I looked after for a short while back 
in early 2000s.

 No idea what the video adapter model was.  It was run as a glass TTY 
only, i.e. no X Window System there, just as you'd expect with a server 
machine, and its text output performance was abysmal, so likely the 
lowest end device, again as expected with a server.  I remember making 
the mistake of running `tar' in the verbose mode w/o stderr redirection.  
The damn thing took forever due to how slow scrolling was with the video 
console.

  Maciej