Hardware

I own a Sun Blade 2000, which I got off of eBay. I can get no useful video output from the Creator 3d (either series two or three) on four different monitors, one of which is a somewhat recent HP vs17. An old Micron gets nothing even when set to a resolution and sync rate which I know beyond a shadow of a doubt works. One ancient ViewSonic 4e does display garbled, rolling output, initially in green but now red. The other three monitors display nothing at all.

Before posting my problem, I did do what I could to solve it on my own with the help of the documentation as well as previous forum posts here and elsewhere. I think that I've tracked down the problem to the 13w3 convertor cable.

The cable is about a foot long, has the Sun logo on it, but has no part number that I can find. The only similar cables I have seen are two feet long. So perhaps it was modified at some point.

Regardless of what settings I enter for output-display in OBP, nothing will come up on most monitors. The monitors do get a signal of some sort as they will wake up on boot. As soon as the terminal which I am looking at starts up X, the monitors will then go to sleep. X does start fine, as I can log in through Xnest on my Ubuntu laptop.

I asked the company from which I got the machine about the cable and I have been told that it was set to do csync and not sync on green. I had asked about the former since the ViewSonic output is very much like posts I have seen dealing with hooking up a non sync on green monitor to sync on green video card output.

They are perfectly willing to send me a new convertor, but I'd feel like a putz if it is something else.

So the only real advice I seek is whether the convertor cable is in fact the most likely cause of my problem or if the monitors themselves are simply not able to deal with the output, for whatever reason.

A fuller history of my searches and groping around for information can be found on the Ubuntu Sparc forums here: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=276977