HP/DEC/Compaq

Hola everyone,

I've gotten through devious means, a j6750 box. Any idea on the peformance/use of one of these things?! It seems to have dual 875MHz processors, about 4G RAM, and a single HD. Seems to run Debian well based on website reports. I have never played with HP-UX before, so can't comment there.

Any thoughts on this machine? Worth keeping, or should it go on the selling block? I'm more of a Sun/SPARC guy (my first post here was in the Sun forum yesterday - yay!), so a PA-RISC machine is shrouded in mystery to me...

Looks like a nice machine from the specs I see here: HP j6750 Workstation (PDF) . But if the software or architecture don't interest you it won't compare well with current commodity boxes. HP-UX isn't my favorite variant, but it might be instructive to run through an install, no? Pierce the veil of mystery, and all that?

HP PA-RISC boxes are interesting, but I have to then admit that I use my HP9000s about the least of any of my workstations. They're more the sort of machine you get because you have something that needs to be done and HP-UX is what it gets done on. The ones I have (G70, C180, B1000) are very well built, and they seem to be quite reliable. HP graphics are somewhat interesting - at some point they decided they'd try to challenge SGI on the desktop, and so they released the Visualize-FX line. Stats-wise they're not bad cards, and many run a variant of the PA-RISC processor for geometry. Unfortunately once HP did the hardware they decided they were done, and the Visualize-FX series never got the back-end and software support that SGI has.

HP-UX is pretty vanilla but sadly, unlike Solaris or IRIX, there really isn't much in the way of precompiled freeware selections. SAM is a reasonably-good hand-holding tool for administration, what it looses in hidden occult workings against AIX's SMIT is offset by the more-comprehensible nature of the underlying OS. Newer boxes sport USB, but in common with IRIX there's no block USB device support.

If you can lay your hands on HP-UX 11i it'd be worth playing around a bit, as HP-UX is one of the few proprietary UNIXes still kicking and likely to stay that way (along with AIX and probably Solaris).

Hrmm...

Conundrum - whether to spend time hunting for HP-UX media and going through the adventure of picking up another unix - or selling the machine to get more sparc hardware...

Might have to flip a coin after a few drinks...

HP-UX isn't too awfully hard to find, you'll be better served by it than Linux IMO but I have run both.