[rescue] How to actually get an HP and NextStep 3.3 happy together...

[William Barnett-Lewis]

Now that I appear to have everything running happily, I thought I'd
post a few comments here on the process so that 1) you folks will know
that I'm done creebing every week or so about the problems I'm having
and 2) to get it into a forum that Google will search for others who
may need the information.

1) HP's are apparently very fussy about the CD-ROM drive used to boot 
from. It must be a _2x or slower_ drive that understands 512 blocks. 
Even then, it may just be the luck of the draw. It wouldn't even see the 
IPL from a Plextor 4x drive. It would see the IPL and boot but give 
time-out errors from a AppleCD 300 (OEM Sony CDU561-25). It boots 
without any qualms, quibbles, or hesitations from a Toshiba XM-4101B 
half-hieght drive from a Sparcstation 4 that I had to jury rig into an 
external case.

2) SCSI IDs don't matter. Once you have a drive that the HP likes, it's 
irrelevant what ID any given SCSI device has. I ended up using the 
default ID's listed in the HP service manual for the 715. Note this is 
contrary to the advice at: http://www.openpa.net/next.html I suspect 
that he had a drive that was marginal to the HP rom and _that_ caused 
his odd read errors rather than anything to do with the ID number.

3) Large Drives - in this case greater than 2 gb are a bit of a problem 
but not as bad as could be. In 3.3, 2 gb is as large as this version 
understands so the installer partitioned my 4 gb ST15150N into two 2 gb 
partitions. No need to putter with disktab entries. However, it only 
automatically mounts sd0a as /. It is up to the user to add sd0b and 
it's mount point to /etc/fstab. I mount it on /me so that I have the 
full 2 gb for the user account.

4) It's really quite amazing how snappy a 64 mhz PA-RISC with 256 mb of 
ram is with this OS. Framemaker, the Lighthouse Apps, Omniweb, etc are 
all quite useable. It will be interesting to see how Framemaker holds up 
with a serious document though.

5) I found an app, PopOver, that will download to Mail.app from a Pop3 
account. Is there a similar one for uploading to a pop3 server? Or a 
good tutorial for setting up Nextstep probably very antiquated Sendmail 
to do so?

6) I am definitely going to have to save my pennies for a copy of 
Mathmatica for Nextstep from Blackhole Inc. He's advertising
"Price: We now have permission from Wolfram Research to reproduce and 
distribute Mathematica for the NeXT platform for $49.95 to cover our 
costs. We will include flyers for Wolfram's latest products on other 
platforms with each order. We are psyched to be able to offer this and 
for anyone owning an earlier version of Mathematica for the NeXT 
platform you will be able to upgrade to 3.0.2 for $29.95 per seat. 
10/22/03 If interested just email us or order! " 
http://www.blackholeinc.com/catalog/software/Software/Scientific/Mathematica.shtml

Hopefully this is of help to someone else. Thank you to all of you here who
helped me get this machine up and running in the very best rescue manner.

Thanks,

William




-- 
Live like you will never die, love like you've never been hurt, dance
like no-one is watching.
				Alex White