Setting the Console to a Specific Monitor

Problem: You have more than one monitor attached to the system, and the console is not set to the intended monitor.

• If you have more than one monitor attached to the system, OpenBoot always assigns the console to the frame buffer specified by the output-device NVRAM parameter. The default value of output-device is screen, which is an alias for one of the frame buffers found by the firmware.

A common way to change this default is to change output-device to the appropriate frame buffer:

ok nvalias myscreen /sbus/cgsix
ok setenv output-device myscreen 
ok reset-all 

Another way of setting the console to a specific monitor is to change the sbus-probe-list NVRAM parameter.

ok show sbus-probe-list 	 						(
Display the current and default values)

If the frame buffer that you are choosing as the console is in slot 2, change sbus-probe-list to probe slot 2 first:

ok setenv sbus-probe-list 2013
ok reset-all 

If a non-SBus frame buffer is installed, this second method may not work.