Need Help - SS20 Solaris 9 - SX (cg14) Graphics

So I know this is antique hardware, but I dusted off my SS20 recently
and did a fresh install of Solaris 9.

The system is configured with 2 x 200Mhz Ross RT626 cpus, 448mb RAM
and an 8mb VSIMM for the SX graphics.

My Solaris 9 media is the 2002 original media kit and I applied the
latest 9_Recommended patch cluster. Also applied the mandatory Gnome
2.0 patches (for the Gnome distro on the Contrib CD) and a few others.

I've also installed a lot of stuff from the CSW archives from the /
current tree.

Problems -

I'm playing around with various window managers and combinations of
apps that works best on this beast. Try as I might I can't get many
of the alternative window managers to fire up. I'm using the SX
graphics obviously and experimenting with both 8 and 24bpp.

1. CDE - Works fine
2. fluxbox (from CSW) - Works fine
3. xfce4 (from CSW) - Starts but will eventually kill the Xserver and
aborts back to the dtlogin screen
4. windowmaker (from CSW) - I can get it to start 1 out of 3 tries,
but it quickly dies and aborts back to the dtlogin screen.
5. windowmaker (from Sol9 Contrib CD) - Same as 4.
6. enlightenment (from CSW) - Immediately dies and aborts back to
dtlogin screen.
7. Gnome2 (the official Sun download) - Same as 3.

There really is no more information. No core files and the Xerrors
file just shows something like Xsun:0.0 terminated unexpectedly.

So I'd really like to get some feedback from anyone who has or had a
SS20 and SX graphics running Solaris 9 and how that all worked out.
Is there some general instability in the SX graphics drivers that
prevents some of the more modern window managers from working? Or
maybe there is some obscure patch that I'm missing. The 9_Recommended
included the big X11 (112785-65) patch so that should all be up to
date.


Thanks

On 29 Jul., 19:49, Sanford Barton <xc68...@gmail.com> wrote:

*snip*

Honestly, I would just use CDE and be done with it?

Alternatively, what about fvwm?

On Jul 30, 6:43*am, "claus.k...@googlemail.com"
<clausk...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 Jul., 19:49, Sanford Barton <xc68...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> *snip*
>
> Honestly, I would just use CDE and be done with it?
>
> Alternatively, what about fvwm?

Dude, if actually wanted to get some work done, I'd used my quad core
mac pro upstairs

For me it's more about seeing what you can push these old systems to
do. The idea that all the "new" stuff thats come out since 1993 only
run dog slow on this box is mostly true, but not completely.

For the above list, I'd say Fluxbox is the best manager. It runs very
well at 24bpp. Solaris 9 is actually faster than Solaris 8, and throw
Dillo on the thing and your surfing as fast or faster than a modern
desktop (sans animated gifs, flash, https, etc). It's fun to play
around if thats your thing, and for me it is.

The SX graphics driver may need to be configured to reserve a portion of contiguous
system memory for eg: double-buffering, pixmap buffers, et al.

See the manpage for cg14config and read the comments in the startup script:

# more /etc/init.d/cg14*