[hamei]

I don't know about narratives but someone definitely has their facts wrong.

Look at the back side of an O2. That's what we call a VGA connector. Standard old-world VGA, connects to just about anything. That's one reason the O2 was more popular than some others, back when monitors were picky and sheep ran scared - it's the only one that came that way. No 13w3, no dvi, just garden variety VGA.

Most CRT's will have no problem with the O2 sync on green. Many will have an extra greenish cast, others totally ignore it, a few go bonkers and say no way Jose, I'm not gonna work. But those are the minority. (O2 is different from the SGI's that only had sync on the green line, O2 has the normal peecee style as well.)

I have never heard of a non-fixed-frequency CRT that didn't sync up at 60 hz. Even the fixed-frequency monitors were generally 60 hz refresh. I say "generally" because I didn't own every single one, but all the ones I saw or had were. The higher refresh rates on multi-syncs were available on the more expensive monitors. You had to pay extra for those and they still synced (sanc ? sunc ?) at 60. In fact it was common for fixed frequency monitors to sync at 60. I replaced the Zenith 1492 with a 16" HP one on a Vectra, maybe Warp 3 ? The thing was, you couldn't see the boot screen as it wasn't until the OS took control that the resolution was changed, bootup was 640-480, aka vga. It was all 60 hz tho. Even the 1492 ran at 60. Everything ran at 60.

Changing res is easy (but annoying), you can even do it blind (have had to many times, I have the unfortunate habit of mucking stuff up. "Let's try this !" uhm, here's another thing I shoulda not done ...) Anyway, you just get into the prom blind by hitting esc about a million times while the machine boots, and even if the prom itself is a no-show you type "setenv graphics l" blind (I think it's l, could be low) then reboot and you'll at least have the prom, from which you can hop into the boot disk and change the res from a command line. This whole process has been explained so many times that if people are too lazy/stupid to do a search, too bad for them.

The remark about a single CD was because the OP mentioned he "had an ISO" which rang my alarm bells, unless it's 6.3 he needs more than one iso. 6.5 takes a bunch. While we're here, if a 6.3 is available somewhere, it's a TON easier to install and runs all the same programs and works quite well on an O2. At this date I'd probably run that.

None of this stuff is magic, it's all well-documented, Techpubs is the place to go, SGI did really good manuals, and some of you young'uns have some very strange misconceptions.