We cannot have a PCI graphics card because the box has only one PCI slot (and one AGP slot but we don't want to spend money just to get an AGP card for this server that will never be used) and that is needed for the RAID card. Interestingly enough your point about kernel panics - I've had quite a few and invariably the VGA doesn't work either, especially if the console has X running - completely hopeless in that case. In my experience, when the kernel kills scheduling (as it often seems to do if there's a misbehaving driver), only the SysRq mechanism does anything. I'd hoped that a serial console was the way out of that, so I could at least get proper oops messages to feed to ksymoops. Anyway we plan to run either Win 2003 Server or a very, very stable install of SuSE 8.2 on this box so kernel instability should not occur. The openbios project sounds interesting - my business partner and I were hoping that there might be something like that around, I'll look into that. Thanks for your help Simon and Frank. Carl Peto Linux Administrator Bookman Associates ----- Original Message ----- From: "Simon Thornton" <simon.thornton@swift.com> To: "'Carl Peto'" <carl@bookmanassociates.com> Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 9:24 AM Subject: RE: [suse-autoinstall] Server without VGA graphics card - how to convince BIOS to continue booting

Hi Carlo,

On some systems it is possible to disable the graphics card in the bios, but for many you will get an error if it is removed. There is no harm in leaving a card in, you don't have to connect anything to it. What I do is get an old PCI card (5-$10) with limited capabilities and put that in, I can then re-use the graphics card elsewhere.

Overall, having the card maybe a life saver if there is a problem with the system, you can then connect a monitor to see what the problem was. A classic would be if there was a kernel panic/BSoD event; you r serial console would be inoperative. Unlike Solaris machines, where the console is always active, the PC requires a working OS to drive the serial port.

One other thought, the linux bios project (also the openbios project) have a replacement for the conventional BIOS. One feature of this is serial console access at boot up. I've never tried this but it maybe worth a look.

Rgds,

Simon

----- Original Message ----- From: "Frank Steiner" <fst@bio.informatik.uni-muenchen.de> To: "Carl Peto" <carl@bookmanassociates.com> Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 9:08 AM Subject: Re: [suse-autoinstall] Server without VGA graphics card - how to convince BIOS to continue booting

As far as I know, you cannot boot a PC-base computer without a graphics card. It considers a graphics card as essential as e.g. memory.

cu, Frank -- Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner Mail: fst_at_bio.informatik.uni-muenchen.de Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik Phone: +49 89 2180-4049, Fax: -4054 LMU, Amalienstr. 17 http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~fst/ 80333 Muenchen, Germany * Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. *