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?
Progress perhaps. (Score:2)
HR Puffin' stuff actual URL (Score:3)
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!'
hmmm (Score:1)
Lets get the party-goers drunk! (Score:1)
Re:Or run the OpenBSD hppa port ? Free, downloadab (Score:2)
I was under the impression (from the page) that OpenBSD/hppa isn't really "usable" yet either. Correct me if I'm wrong...
PuffinFest? (Score:2)
ALS: The First Day of Exhibitions (Score:3)
THE GOOD
THE BAD
THE UGLY
THE REST
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.
Re:Progress perhaps. (Score:1)
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!
Re:Progress perhaps. (Score:1)
Prob. not usable yet, but get HP-UX 10.20 gratis (Score:2)
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? (Score:1)
Re:BOF? (Score:1)