A few months back, I acquired a Sun Fire V250 server (circa 2003) from a computer auction at a local university. When I got it home, however, nothing was displayed on the screen. A lot of searching later and I was really no closer to solving the issue. Several Sources suggested I type “setenv output-device screen” or “screen output” at the OpenBoot prompt (ok> prompt), but both only said “screen not found.”
After finding this support page, I learned of the “obdiag” command in OpenBoot. When I ran it, though, no graphics card was shown. Hardware problem.
When I move the graphics card to another slot, however, a lot of things go haywire. For example, when I rerun obdiag, I get “Can’t run OBDIAG from the device tree node or with the active instance.” This Page said to run “unselect-dev,” but that only gave another strange error.
I pull the card back out, and examine it. This is when I learn it’s an XVR-100. A quick look at the installation guide pointed me at the “show-displays” command. I reinstall the card in the original slot, turn the machine on and. . .
It initializes the graphical console.
Four months and all I had to do was reseat the graphics adapter. Good going, self.
Since it was such a pain, I decided to write this article in case some other poor sap is scouring the internet for this very specific issue on incredibly obscure hardware (by today’s standards). Just reseat the card.