[rescue] Linux on PA-RISC (was: hp visualize-s.. B's and C's)

[Steve Pacenka]

On Tue, 2002-10-22 at 18:22, Linc Fessenden wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Leslie Connally wrote:
> 
> > looking around, there are some good sites on Linux (esp Debian) on PA-RISC..
> > 
> > http://parisc-linux.org/
> > > http://hwdb.parisc-linux.org/
> > 
> > www.debian.org (PARISC "HPPA" is officially part of 3.0)
> > >esp: http://www.debian.org/ports/hppa/
> 
> Has anyone done this yet though?  What are your impressions?
> I have a nice 720 (725?) hanging around that I would really like to try
> this on...  Saw a demo at Linuxworld convention past - a 715(i
> think) running dual head using some sgi flat panel displays.  It was
> glorious, but that's before the debian port was *officially
> released*.  Haven't heard of anyone trying since..

I had a 720 and a 735/99 running Linux just before Woody graduated to
"stable" in July. There wasn't anything else but Woody for this platform
then.  I installed uneventfully from an early CD distribution and then
upgraded via HTTP.  I compiled my own kernels to do some patching to get
X working on my particular framebuffer.  

I'd say that PA-RISC Linux is in pretty good shape both for kernel and
developer applications.

The kernel and XFree86 via fbdev include support for some 8 and 24 bit
1280x960 (maybe x1024) framebuffers.  There was enough horsepower to run
Gnome 1.4 at 24 bits on a 735/99 with around 200M of RAM and a 7200 RPM
hard drive.  I had gnumeric, abiword, and gnome applets running.

HPIL keyboards and mice are supported.  Sound on the 735 is supported. 
It felt strange to play MP3s on this platform.  Heaviest MP3 player I've
ever used :^) .

The 720 was somehwat anemic in X performance at 24 bits but was okay
with an 8 bit framebuffer.  It took a couple of hours to compile a
kernel.


The main limitation for me in July was that quite a few X applications
packages were available in PA-RISC Woody but would not complete
installation or runtime linking on the 7xx platforms.  No mozilla,
galeon, dillo, xemacs, emacs, xmms.  A recent query on the HPPA kernel
mailing list yielded similar experience by others with 7xx'es.

Linux is quite promising on this platform, and has some good people
working on the kernel (with HP assistance).

-- SP