Re: IBM 43p model 150

[Patrick Finnegan <pat%computer-refuge.org@localhost>]

On Saturday 03 March 2007 12:36, you wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> my company was about to throw away an old IBM 43p model 150 and I
> hopefully swerved it to my home instead :-).
> It seems the spec are available here:
>     http://www.spec.org/gpc/June99/plb/IBM/summary/IBM.001.html
>
> Currently there is an old AIX 4.3 on it, an OS about which I don't
> know anything about so I can't gather the actual informations from
> the running OS.

lscfg and lsattr should tell you just about anything you want to know 
about the hardware, from inside AIX.

> Since it doesn't have a VGA adapter, I'm doomed to use the serial
> port.  I burned prepcd-3.1.iso and inserted the CD but I see AIX
> booting on the serial port.

You'll need to enter SMS (sort of a bios for newer AIX boxes), by hitting 
the "1" key on your serial terminal when the machine is displaying a 
line of text like this:
     memory      keyboard     network      scsi      speaker
Hit the "1" key repeatedly before it says "speaker", and it should dump 
you int SMS, where you can chose what device to boot off of.

> Since I have always used x86 so far, I didn't use to these less
> popular platforms.  From what I've managed to read on the archives,
> NetBSD/prep is not the only platform I can use.  So I would like to
> know what is the best platform to use on this particular computer.
>
> My second question is "Will the CD image switch automatically
> to the serial console ?"

I don't think that NetBSD supports that machine too well, as it's a CHRP 
machines not a PReP machine.  I do know that Linux and AIX do support 
it, though.

I'm sure that the NetBSD/prep people would appreciate any help you could 
give to get NetBSD running on the machine.

Pat
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