9fans archive / 2000 / 12 / 43 /    prev next

From: George Michaelson <ggm@dst...>
Subject: Re: [9fans] VGA Hell, what else?! 
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 14:31:08 +1000


  Until aux/vga runs, the screen is in CGA mode, that's an 80 character
  wide by 25 line text mode. You can do graphics in it and the Plan 9 2nd
  Edition release did exactly that during the install phases. However,
  the predominant depths used for graphics in the 2nd Edition were 1
  and 4 bits, i.e. there wasn't much colour. We were told often that we
  were not colourful enough so we ported back the graphics model we did
  for Inferno, which was 8 bits deep and abandoned the older stuff. Was
  that the right choice? I don't know but I'm happy enough in that
  I don't need colour for what I do (I'm in CGA mode half the time).
  Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have the NVIDIA and 3Dlabs cards I
  have lying on the shelf working with Plan 9, but I don't have the
  time or inclinationto reverse-engineer an XFree86 driver without
  documentation. Does anyone else?

I believe somebody else is working on the card I care about and when I
get back to the box with the boot floppy I will be following up on that
but I think this piece of history exposes a design decision which had
bad ramifcations for code in release to the wider userbase. adding flashy
drivers was good. loosing the ability to install on base CGA was bad.

Please don't get me wrong, I know why these kinds of decisions get made
and I'm not looking to hassle anyone to do work they don't have time for.

Have I missed something? If you are in CGA mode, does that mean that
the install phase could still be made to work in CGA mode?

-George