I got this 17" monitor from the local uni surplus recently. What caught
my attention (besides the $10 price) was that it had an HD-15 VGA connector,
a Macintosh 15-pin connector *and* BNCs, and a 2-line LCD display on the
front. I figured it was worth the risk since with no cable attached, I
couldn't test it there. It passed the crackle-hum test on the bench and
I brought it home.
Random button poking does not seem to be a useful way of guiding it through
setup. There's a row of 8 numbered buttons (also labelled for changing
width and position) and a menu button. Additionally, there is a toggle
switch on the front for "BNC" vs. "DSUB" and for "user settings" vs "presets"
I can get a stable picture of a laptop in its BIOS setup after a fashion,
but it's only when I'm in the middle of certain operations on the monitor
frontpanel. I can't get it to stick. The monitor LCD says that it's
640x480 _at_ 70Hz. If I get to the Phoenix spash screen telling me nifty things
about the innards of the laptop prior to booting the disk, the MX17 tells me
that the sync is "SuperVGA 800x600 _at_ 60Hz" which I guess makes sense even
though it's a 80x25 character display because the laptop is nominally 800x600
unless you hit "Fn FONT" to kick it down to non-stretched pixels occupying
75% of the entire screen. It also matters if the CRT/LCD mode is one or both;
that seems to affect what the external scan rate is (also not unexpected from
earlier fiddlings with Solaris on this laptop - it was a bear getting the
settings right for X on the LCD).
So... ramblings aside, I'm looking for a setup guide for how to tell the
monitor what to expect is coming in. It has 8 user-definable modes and I
can't figure out how to tell it what the definitions are. I did a quick
Google search and only came up with reseller sites and a couple quick
mentions in an SGI Indy FAQ and a mega list of what scan rates are supported
by which monitors for XF86 - less than 50 hits on MX17 in all.
Thanks,
-ethan
=====
Visit "The Seventh Continent"
http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger
http://phonecard.yahoo.com/
Received on Fri Jul 27 2001 - 20:24:06 BST