Changing screen resolution/depth on a Sun Blade 100 with Solaris

I searched docs.sun.com, all of the user manuals provided with the Solaris 8 media kit (which is quite numerous), and ended up digging through every man page I could find before finally figuring this out (and if you use Solaris, then you know how hard it is to find man pages since all of the man page directories are scattered throughout the filesystem and this makes maintaining an whatis database impossible, which then means that man -k is useless).

Problem

How to change screen resolution/depth/refresh-rates in Solaris 8/9 on a Sun Blade 100?

Solution

The video device that comes with a Sun Blade is the m64 device, and it is controlled by the /usr/sbin/m64config utility. The man page has all of the details for it, but here is its general usage:

   # m64config [ -depth 8 | 24 ] [ -dev /dev/fbs/m640 ]
            [ -res 1920x1080x72 | 1600x1200x75 | 1280x1024x67 | 1280x1024x76 ]
            [ now | try ]

If you don't tell it to force the change now, then you must reboot for the change to take effect. Also, note that the argument for the -res switch is WIDTHxHEIGHTxREFRESH-RATE, not WIDTHxHEIGHTxDEPTH like in other utilities.