UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to run openwin on Solaris 5.8, but get an error:


/dev/fb: No such file or directory
Graphics Adapter device /dev/fb is of unknown type

Fatal server error:
InitOutput: Error loading module for /dev/fb

giving up.
/usr/openwin/bin/xinit: Connection refused (errno 146): unable to connect to X
server
/usr/openwin/bin/xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

I also can not do xhost + and have set the display variable...

There is no device in /dev called fb, and I want to know how you create this?

This is what the /dev/fb* devices are on my system:
This means, the actual /dev/fb0 is only a link to /dev/fbs/gfxp0, which also is a link to /devices/pci@1f,400/TSI,gfxp@4:gfxp0
The device is a charactor device, which you would make with the mknod(1M) command. And from my output, you can see, the device has a major of 68 and a minor of 0, so if you were to create this specific device the command would be:
mknod /devices/pci@1f,4000/TSI,gfxp@4:gfxp0 c 68 0

Thanks for the suggestion. I think something is seriously wron on this system...

root@finoradev # mknod /devices/pci@1f,4000/TSI,gfxp@4:gfxp0 c 68 0
mknod: No such file or directory

There are also no /dev/gfx* devices in that dir? It looks like a complete setup for the graphics devices needs to be done.

It's rather dangerous to just use the mknod command directly like that.

There is a devlinks utility that will recreate the symbolic links in the /dev directory. There is also a drvconfig utility that can create the stuff in the /devices utility.

Sun has a notion of a "reconfiguation" reboot and I think that this is the safest approach for a start. You just "touch /reconfigure" and then you reboot. The start-up scripts notice the file /reconfigure and run stuff like drvconfig and devlinks automatically.

This looks like another post from you. I replied to it concerning if this is a new installation. There is documented for Solaris 7 and below getting this error if you built the system without the proper OEM support.

if the client was installed from an OS Service that did
not include OEM support, the system may not have the proper packages
to run OpenWindows or CDE. The symptom of this problem is an error message similar the following, when attempting to start a windowing system:

/dev/fb: No such file or directory
Graphics Adapter device /dev/fb is of unknown type

The fix is to reload the OS with the proper OEM support -

In order to avoid the above stated problems, the following
recommendations for client configuration must be applied:

1. The easiest solution is to remove the OS Service. Then readd the
OS Service selecting the "Entire Distribution + OEM" as the
cluster type. The Entire Distribution + OEM cluster
will install all the required packages. This is more convenient
than adding individual packages especially if more clients are
going to be added at a later date.

Thank you very much for the help! I will give it a go.