[cctalk] Linux on HPPA - was Re: Old UNIX Systems

Just for the record, I have a J6750 HP workstation currently running Debian Lenny for HPPA. Debian has pretty much dropped support for the architecture, but certain interested individuals have been working off and on to update packages and push it back up to the stable version of Debian 'Wheezy' (7.0.0). You can follow the progress on the debian-hppa at lists.debian.org or at http://parisc-linux.org/. They're getting pretty close to another full release (install 'iso's, etc.), hopefully withing the next month or 2. There's still not much in the way of video/Xorg support for most of the HP graphics cards, since HP is not real helpful on releasing code for these devices, even though most of these machines are obsolete. If you're lucky enough to have an ATI Fire GL-UX PCI-X graphics card, you actually CAN get a working desktop environment, although they're still prohibitively expensive, since they were designed specifically for HPPA architecture. I have one, but unfortunately, it's got a bad chip and won't go into full GUI mode. You can, however, install vnc-server and actually do a remote desktop on another machine, no matter what video card you happen to have. With Lenny, they did manage to get the SMP kernel straightened out and both processors now work, and it speeded things up immensely. If everything can get pushed into 7.0.0 stable, we might even get a little more graphics support. These little 64 bit workstations usually came with 8+ gigs of RAM and dual PA-8800 875 MHZ. processors, and they run linux much quicker than the old HP-UX 11i system, and make ideal web/mail servers, and despite the dual processors, they aren't terribly power hungry like their bigger counterparts, the 9000 servers. :) -- Dave Land Land Computer Service Check out my site at http://www.landcomp.net