David Edwards writes:
- On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, Feico Dillema wrote:
- > At the computer science department of the University of Tromsų, Norway
- > we have a few dozen HPPA machines that will be phased out in the next
- > few weeks. Reason is they run HPUX 9 which is not Y2K compliant and
- > this will not be fixed. They won't be upgraded to HPUX 10 either, but
- > instead will be phased out. If we have no free OS available for these
- > machines to run, they will be send to our computer graveyard. I'm 
- > interested in keeping these machines alive in order to use them as
- > `basement-servers' in our home networks for example.
- <MUNCH>
- 
- There is an ongoing Linux port to the PA-RISC architecture... If you
- decide to port FreeBSD, that would probably be a good place to look for
- machine information. (I could be entirely wrong, but I think it's yet
- another incarnation of MkLinux, Linux on Mach, so you may end up needing
- to look at Mach, too.)

	There is an HP funded native port of Linux to the HPPA
PA-RISC 1.1 systems.  However, it doesn't seem to be getting
particularly far very fast.

	There is an existing mkLinux/HPPA that runs on a number of
HP9000/700 series workstations (but _not_ the 715/33, for what ever
reason.)  It can be found at ftp.cirr.com:/pub/hppa/mklinix.  I
have it running on a 712 and a 720 at the moment.

	OpenBSD has a hppa project going as well, although it
appears to have been slow of late.. (the port `maintainer' has
been busy/sick, as I understand it.)

	There's been a lot of interest on the NetBSD side of the
world, but the last person to work on a NetBSD port apparently
wasn't satisified with what he had produced, and hadn't released
it to the foundation (third++ hand information/speculation.)

	I don't think the FreeBSD folks are going to be interested
in the HPPA platform just yet.. They've just about gotten their
Alpha port cleaned up, and are slowly starting to work on the SPARC
port..

	Finally, there is a Mach/HPPA with the BSD-Lites server
available from the University of Utah in the US.  it can be found
off of the FLUX OS project pages.. (I should mirror that tree here
as well.)

	Of everything listed here, the only currently _usable_ free
OS for the HPPA is mkLinux/HPPA. (At least in my opinion.  :-)

	All of that said, I'm figuring on doing some bit-bashing
on getting OpenBSD running on the PA-RISC boxes in the next few
weeks.. I'll certainly be trying to get a kernel to boot on all
three classes of systems I have access to: 712/60, 715/33, and
720/50..

--
Eric Schnoebelen		eric@cirr.com		http://www.cirr.com
    At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial 
		challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
					  -- Washington Post Magazine,6/9/85