Some history about the little Unix box that could...
The J-series workstations from Hewlett-Packard were some of the most powerful and compact all-around commercial workstations available. They featured super efficient RISC processors and generally had a generous amount of RAM (sometimes 8GB or more) to handle large graphics applications, and generally came loaded with the minimalistic CDE desktop environment.
This particular machine was a lucky find on E-Bay as it was in almost perfect condition with dual 875 MHZ. PA-RISC processors, 8 GB. of RAM, and dual 36.4 GB. SCSI Ultra-160 hard drives. It came pre-loaded with HP-UX 11i, and unfortunately wasn’t setup properly for the graphical desktop to work. Machine was then changed to Debian HPPA Linux for a while, and remotely administered, since the FX-10 graphics card doesn’t support Linux.
I was really interested in getting the original OS install discs to attempt to make *everything* work, and finally lucked out, once again, on E-Bay. They say the third time is the charm, and that was the case with my OEM install experience with Unix. The third install, I finally got all the network parameters set to work properly with my local network and everything came to life!
I now have all the web server components installed, 2 working desktops including CDE & Ximian Gnome, Veritas Enterprise Disk Manager, and a host of other goodies. There’s still a lot of configuration and bug checking to do, but with all the currently available updates from HP, the machine is pretty much rock stable! Incidentally, the site you're viewing now is on this very machine. ;)
This is just a small portion of what the J6750 is capable of, and I learn more about it everyday. File and directory layouts and command structure is a bit different than in Linux, so I have to be careful I don’t break anything before I get it fully functional. :-)
More to come as the experimenting continues. Stay tuned!
The J-series workstations from Hewlett-Packard were some of the most powerful and compact all-around commercial workstations available. They featured super efficient RISC processors and generally had a generous amount of RAM (sometimes 8GB or more) to handle large graphics applications, and generally came loaded with the minimalistic CDE desktop environment.
This particular machine was a lucky find on E-Bay as it was in almost perfect condition with dual 875 MHZ. PA-RISC processors, 8 GB. of RAM, and dual 36.4 GB. SCSI Ultra-160 hard drives. It came pre-loaded with HP-UX 11i, and unfortunately wasn’t setup properly for the graphical desktop to work. Machine was then changed to Debian HPPA Linux for a while, and remotely administered, since the FX-10 graphics card doesn’t support Linux.
I was really interested in getting the original OS install discs to attempt to make *everything* work, and finally lucked out, once again, on E-Bay. They say the third time is the charm, and that was the case with my OEM install experience with Unix. The third install, I finally got all the network parameters set to work properly with my local network and everything came to life!
I now have all the web server components installed, 2 working desktops including CDE & Ximian Gnome, Veritas Enterprise Disk Manager, and a host of other goodies. There’s still a lot of configuration and bug checking to do, but with all the currently available updates from HP, the machine is pretty much rock stable! Incidentally, the site you're viewing now is on this very machine. ;)
This is just a small portion of what the J6750 is capable of, and I learn more about it everyday. File and directory layouts and command structure is a bit different than in Linux, so I have to be careful I don’t break anything before I get it fully functional. :-)
More to come as the experimenting continues. Stay tuned!
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