Well, synchronicity makes its typical play again. The same day I whinge about my lost-in-limbo Ultra 20 workstation, it shows up on my doorstep. So I drag it inside and unpack it. The keyboard's kind of cheap (I use a Unicomp Classic at work, and an Avant Stellar at home), but it's usable. The documentation's pretty skimpy, but all I have to do is plug in the keyboard, mouse and monitor and add the power and network cables and I'm good to go, right? Well, in an alternate, reasonable reality this might have been so, but this is my life so what comes next is not unexpected: The machine roars (and I mean ROARS) to life, then quickly quiets down as the CPU temperature sensor throttles back the fan on the heat sink. The little system status light turns green, indicating that the POST went successfully. All's good, except I have no video. I should point out that I got the "medium-sized" Ultra 20, which includes 1GB of memory and an Opteron 148 CPU. It also includes an nVidia NVS280 accellerated graphics card, which supports up to two DVI monitors. I don't have a DVI monitor (yet), so I plugged my VGA monitor into the on-board video (an ATI Rage XL chipset). Apparently there's no monitor sensing or anything, video goes somewhere by default and of course, in my case, goes Somewhere Else.
So, in short, I'd like to be terribly impressed by the Ultra 20, but that hasn't happened yet. Right now Plan A is to take the whole thing down to the basement and hook it up to the TV (which has a DVI input), but I still need a cable which I probably will only use once. Plan B is to get a DVI monitor, but I don't have the cash ready for a nice one and I'd hate to get a cheap one and then have to fight to justify replacing it in a few months when I have some cash together. What to do, what to do....
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