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Linux Software

PuffinFest at ALS 21

Chris Beard of The Puffin Group wrote in to say that the birds are partying again. Throughout the week, anyone at ALS will have the opportunity to hack on, or talk to someone hacking on the PA-RISC port of Linux (which is rumoured to boot sash now). The Puffins also sponsored two BOFs today - anyone have a report to give?
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PuffinFest at ALS

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  • Does this mean that PA-RISC is starting to shape up as a possible reality? Being an HP-UX admin I can tell you that the hardware this thing is run on is capable of a lot of good to the Linux world especially in the SMP areas if it is chosen to pursue. Right now the N Class machines are the model for the eventual IA64 deployments on HP servers. This seems like a good opportunity to make a impact quick with porting Linux over to PA-RISC. Thats just my feelings though.
  • by Money__ ( 87045 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @03:07PM (#1612694)
    The original story pointed to the wrong doc. the press release is here. [thepuffingroup.com]

    I think it's nice to see major companys throwing there name behind Linux and it's cause. HP has over 100,000 employees worldwide and had total revenue of $47.1 billion in its 1998.

    In the famous words of many US congressmen, 'a billion here, a billion there, sooner or later, that's real money!'

  • by Killio ( 102774 )
    Does anyone know when it's supposed to be out?
  • Maybe if they party enough, we can get them drunk enough to give us free equipment :P *evil grin* How about it Rob? Of course you want some equipment. --Brian.
  • I was under the impression (from the page) that OpenBSD/hppa isn't really "usable" yet either. Correct me if I'm wrong...

  • I first read that as "Puffin' Fest," which would be an interesting title indeed. Puffing on what, one would wonder...
  • by rwg ( 59312 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @07:30PM (#1612704)
    After surviving an afternoon at the show floor of the Atlanta Linux Showcase, I figured this would be as good a place as any to post a few thoughts about what I saw...

    THE GOOD

    • LinuxCare [linuxcare.com]'s little bootable Linux recovery CD kicks ass. No bigger than a business card [shapecd.com], it fits in the 3" diameter groove in CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive trays and has the potential to save your butt when lilo eats itself. They also had some Linux stickers that now adorn the case of my 386... (Yes, it runs Linux.)
    • IBM [ibm.com] had a presence. Although certainly not the largest or flashiest booth in the show, Quake 3 [quake3arena.com] on a rather large plasma display attracted lots of attention. Dual PII-400 Intellistation + Voodoo 3 3000 [3dfx.com] + large plasma display. Mmmmmm. Thanks to the guys there for letting me get some game time on that mammoth thang...
    • O'Reilly [ora.com] also had a presence, and their trade show pricing kicks much booty. Picked up a few books for 20% off list and got a shirt to boot...
    • Mad props to VA Linux Systems [valinux.com] for not only having a cool booth and giving away lots of stuff but for supplying the machines used for public Internet access. Their Debian boxed set [debian.org] is pretty cool and sports Learning Debian GNU/Linux [oreilly.com] from O'Reilly [ora.com]. (Yes, I was one of the people who stood around in line for ten or fifteen minutes to win this...)
    • Thanks to the Sun [sun.com] and Rave Systems [rave.net] folks for all the free stuff. Learn to play Quake 2 without cheating before next year's show... :-) (Now where's my complimentary Sparc 5?)

    THE BAD

    • None of the shirts I got fit. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. I'm 6-foot-3-inches tall and weigh 295 pounds. Show me the big-assed shirts!
    • The IBM guys told me that the Showcase had a T-1 connection to the 'Net. I couldn't verify -- the packet loss and latency was horrible on the connection. I'm hoping this is only because lots of geeks were pounding on the connection like a pack of wild monkeys...
    • Food choices were few, and lines were long. Within the Galleria, your choices were Subway, some cafe whose name I don't remember, Ruby Tuesday's, and Chick-Fil-A. If you were bold, you could go to the movie theater downstairs and buy a big tub of popcorn. The group I was with walked across the street to another mall and ate at Arby's. Yum... I think.

    THE UGLY

    • Where the hell were the Slackware [slackware.com] people? I wanted Slackware apparel... Hmmph.
    • Linux merchandise places came out of the woodworks to hock their goods. Yay capitalism...
    • Don't eat at Shoney's [shoneys.com]. Our group waited over an hour for food before giving up and leaving.

    THE REST

    • The andover.net [andover.net]/freshmeat.net [freshmeat.net]/slashdot.org [slashdot.org] booth was smack dab next to the linux.com [linux.com] booth. Taken together, it looked like one big congregation of slackers with laptops. All things considered, however, I wouldn't have minded flopping down on the couch for a rest after walking around for a few hours...
    • I will seek revenge against the guy in the Debian shirt who shot me in the arm with a Nerf dart... muahahahaha
    • The Debian [debian.org] folks had a Sun Ultra 5 [sun.com] running XaoS [paru.cas.cz], Netscape [netscape.com], and some Tetris clone in separate windows. Just for kicks, I maximized the XaoS window. Can we say slideshow?
    • I had nothing interesting enough to trade with the lady at the VA Linux booth, so I didn't get one of those nifty enlightenment [enlightenment.org] shirts. Dammit.
    • NetBSD [netbsd.org] was there. Go figure.

    Overall, it was a pretty cool show, but I wish I didn't have the 2-1/2 hour drive. It was put on very professionally and appeared to be very well organized. I was only slightly disappointed that the show wasn't any bigger... The nifty canvas bag attendees got and the included CD made up for that, though.

  • I'm an HP admin and I do most of my coding in
    perl. Just the usual writing of tools... It seems
    like everytime I want to write a C program
    that ops at a system level I get hung up with
    problems in the differences in the vastly different models.
    I've just been using GCC to most of my C code,
    so I have a feeling that the pa-risc port is going
    so damn slow because of this. There are a million
    different series and they all have different
    implementations of their wierd busses and
    proprietary crap (everytime you want to use a
    struct it's series dependant).

    I really doubt this will get past the educational,
    unless HP intervenes and provides some tools.

    I think they should because my company throws away
    HP9000 equipment all the damn time. It costs more
    to sell it than the money you get back for it. A
    64 meg RAM stick costs 4000 dollars if you need to
    repair it... so no company that would be buying
    used goods would buy a used HP9000!

    unless it suddenly became worth it!

    I hated them when I firsted start using them,
    but it kinda grows on you. I really like the
    keyboards! :-)

  • Does anyone know how close the port is to being usable? I ask because I have a (possible) opportunity to pick up surplus HP-735. If I could have Linux running on this thing in my basement, I'd be in heaven (20" monitor, yeah :)

  • I haven't checked up on the port in a few months, but I doubt it's anywhere near as usable as your typical setup. It should pick up steam soon though.

    What I would like to tell everyone who has an opportunity to pick up a 9000/7xx machine is to go ahead and do it, because even if it comes with HP-UX 9.xx, you can get an ugprade to HP-UX 10.20 [hp.com] gratis from HP as part of their Y2K program. I "rescued" a 720 from an engineering firm who was "upgrading" to NT and have been happily using it for quite some time now at least as a glorified X terminal for my FreeBSD box. My copy of 10.20 is in the mail. :-) In any event, you can have a very usable system -- and quite possibly learn a bit about other UNIXes (which is a very good thing, IMO) while you wait for the Puffin Group to bring their work to a more usable state.

    Grab them while you can! They're really nice boxes.

  • BOF = Bastard Operator From ?
  • BOF = Birds Of a Feather session (kind of an informal meeting on a particular topic)

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