Re: debian-hppa on a C8000
Dear Lothar,
On 3/15/19 10:17, Lothar Paltins wrote:
Am 14.03.19 um 00:17 schrieb John David Anglin:
Helge is right. Unless you are a ATI graphics card expert, you
won't be able to fix the ring test failure.
[...]
I don't want to do real work on this more than 13
years old machine. It's slow compared to current machines and it
consumes almost 300W of electrical power without any load.
But did you notice how silent the c8000 is at the same time (even with
two dual-core PA-8800/8900 installed)? :-) And for the hppa port of
Debian GNU/Linux I think it's a very good combination of size and
hardware resources. In addition it has built-in remote control
capabilities (see [1]).
[1]: https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/BMC
All of my HP
workstations are just museum pieces and to be authentic, all of them are
running HP-UX, except for this one C8000.
Nice! Would you be interested in testing these with Debian to see what
works and what does not?
All of the PA-RISC machines I own, support network booting, so maybe
yours will, too. Testing wouldn't then require an actual on disk
installation, so not touching any existing HP/UX installations or
creating the need for a disk. You only need to setup the needed
infrastructure services (DNS, DHCP, TFTP, NFS, etc.).
But anyway, it's interesting to see that an almost current Linux runs on
it. But it seems to be a little bit fragile. I booted it today and all
messages on the serial console seemed to be correct, but the connected
monitor didn't show the KDE login screen, neither via the DVI nor the
VGA connector.
It could be needed to explicitly activate the graphics card in the BCH.
At least I assume, if you could use the serial console, it either
doesn't switch to graphics console automatically when a keyboard is
attached (as this is done for machines from other vendors, e.g. SGI,
Sun) or the console device is configured to the serial port explicitly.
I tried to log in blindly and this worked, but the
desktop was displayed only on the VGA connector. I logged out from the
session and logged in again, but then the system freezes up after the
desktop background was drawn. I had to switch it off and after powering
it up again it crashed during the next booting.
Did that crash already happen during POST? And does your used graphics
card have an additional power connector?
I noticed instabilities on one of my c8000s with the originally equipped
ATI FireGL X1, which draws all power from the AGP port alone. Changing
it to a graphics card powered by both AGP port and additional power
connector or just removing it, "solved" the instability issues during
POST and boot for me. I wonder if these instabilities are perhaps
related to the aging of the PSU internals. In the end the exhaust air is
always pretty hot with this machine.
Cheers,
Frank
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