At 11:03 PM +0800 7/27/01, Chris Collet wrote:

:)   Does the hp300 port of NetBSD support 7980 or 7978 9 track tape drives?

According to some ancient posts (over 5 years old), and according to the
source for the kernel, yes.  Both should be supported in NetBSD.

:)My HP300 is currently running HP/UX, but for some reason I can't get it to
:)recognize the two tape drives even though I'm pretty sure I used mknod
:)correctly.

Yeah, that was by far one of the most frustrating things about using HP-UX
< 10 -- having to figure out the device file to use.

:)Since my HPIB hard disk is so small, I'd rather stay with HP/UX, but I've
:)given up on getting it to work with the drives. Most of my other
:computers run
:)NetBSD, so if it'll support these drives, I think I'll switch to that.

NetBSD's HP-UX emulation is rather good.  Unless it's talking at a very low
level to hardware, I haven't had HP-UX emulation fail.  Quite a few people
run the HP-UX X11R5 server on their NetBSD boxes.  Matlab for HP-UX runs
*faster* under emulation than for real in HP-UX.

:)  On a side note, is there *any* operating system that will run on HP300's
:)with a 68000 CPU? I know NetBSD won't, and I can't get HP/UX to boot off it.
:)Does 4.4BSD support it?

I think you can now get a free hobbyist license for 4.4BSD.  I assume
you're talking about a model 310 system with a 68010?  Everything else has
a 68020 or better (and thus a reasonable MMU), and should work if it has an
FPU (the 332 doesn't).

Good luck,
  -- MW