Re: zx2000

[Bjorn Helgaas <bjorn.helgaas@hp.com>]

On Wednesday 07 September 2005 9:53 am, Peter Watkinson wrote:
> I acquired an HP zx2000 system. I had to then aquire an Itanium 2 cpu, vrm etc.
> 
> I got the system assembled but I've got a couple of questions
> 
> First the system starts up the power led is lit but the system led
> flashes green colour, there is no display on the vdu. 

If you search for zx2000 on hp.com, you'll find product information
and manuals.  The "Technical Reference Guide" says a blinking green
system LED means "Booting".

I'd hook up a serial console to the serial port on the back of the
system.  Possibly the previous owner had the machine configured to
use only the serial port as the console.

> The system has a pci radeon 7000 vga card I wondered is it that
> the system requires an agp card to display on the vdu.

The PCI video card should work; there's no requirement that it
be AGP.

> This leads to the second question - do you have to use the supported
> cards, disks etc listed by HP, or can you use unsupported cards,
> disks etc if your using an os such as Debian?  

Debian doesn't try to validate whether devices are "supported",
so other cards should work.