[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[nate at portents.com]

> If you want to see this machine perform you have to stick with HPsUX. As
> already mentioned the GFX is supported by HPsUX only. The only other OS
> alternative is Linux. No GFX [0] with Linux.

Well with the right card I can get a 24-bit framebuffer with the 32-bit
kernel at least, but I guess that isn't saying much if it's not
accelerated at all.

How bad is HP-UX?  The way folks talk about it here, it sounds pretty bad.
 I've been a Solaris admin, worked with IRIX, and run Mac OS X, NetBSD,
and Linux at home (Windows for games, and older mothballed machines for
running NeXTSTEP 3.3 on 680x0, PA-RISC and SPARC).  In college I did some
VMS support.  Is HP-UX bad, or is it simply so marginalized that it's a
pain to use because there's not much of a hobbyist community out there and
HP could care less about UNIX on PA-RISC at this point?

> The other problem with
> Linux is GCC. To my experience GCC produces quite bad and slow PA-RISC
> code. So some of the CPU performance is lost due to inefficient
> binaries.

I could believe that, but wouldn't using HP's compilers in HP-UX mean
having to port opensource applications over rather than just recompile? 
Doesn't seem worth it to me if that's the case.

I have sitting around a PowerMac 8600 with a dual 180Mhz 604e card, 1MB of
L2 cache, gig of RAM, PCI Radeon 7200, DEC Tulip-based Apple 10/100
ethernet card, and an ATTO UW-SCSI controller - would I be better off
putting all that together and installing a *BSD UNIX?  Seems to me I
would, though I realize the 50Mhz bus in that system isn't the greatest,
and it wouldn't have the memory bandwidth of the workstations we're
talking about, I imagine the desktop performance isn't going to be that
bad (and we're not talking about my primary desktop machine anyway).  I
might even have a 400Mhz G4 with 1MB of L2 cache sitting around I could
throw in it.

- Nate