Re: IBM 43p model 150

[Jeremie Le Hen <jeremie%le-hen.org@localhost>]

Patrick,

Thank you for you quick reply.

On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 01:47:50PM -0500, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> On Saturday 03 March 2007 12:36, you wrote:
> > 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.

Great.  I didn't know these commands and manual pages are not available
from the running system.  I tried to find them on IBM's website, but I
wasn't able to find my way on it. 

> > 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.

Thanks, I couldn't have deduced this myself :-).


> > 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.

There are number of NetBSD ports than seems to overlap somehow in this
area:
- prep
- macppc
- ofppc

Do you think either "macppc" or "ofpcc" would fit better for this
computer ?


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

I will gladly provide an access to this box and the serial console if
any developper wants to work on it.  Contact me privately for this
purpose.

Thank you.
Best regards,
-- 
Jeremie Le Hen
< jeremie at le-hen dot org >< ttz at chchile dot org >