HP/DEC/Compaq

This is actually being worked on actively. They've made pretty good progress recently too.

There's a current thread on linux-parisc with another patch.

I just need to pick up a serial card to install lol.

That's actually fixed recently too. (The onboard serial port didn't work before).

I don't know exactly when, so it's probably only available in Gentoo, which I'd recommend using anyway.

I just picked one up with identical specs, and I'm pretty sure from the same seller. I frequently used (but did not administer) HP-UX 9 and 10 back in my grad school days, and have an old 735 with 10.20 in my collection, but this is my first experience with HP-UX 11i. The CDE interface really takes me back. The FireGL X1 runs my 1600SW great at its native 1600x1024 over a DVI through the MLA.

You're right about it being quiet, I don't think I've ever run across another air-cooled tower machine as silent as this one. I've got an HP xw8200 at work (very similar case), but it's a lot louder than the C8000. This is a very nice PA-RISC workstation. I'm tempted to replace my PowerBook G4 as a file/download server with this C8000 despite its power consumption. The fact that I can't run the PowerBook with the lid closed has always irritated me, but this thing would run fine headless.

Unlike yours, my case was unlocked but didn't come with the pedestal. There are several available on Ebay, how important do you think the pedestal is? There aren't any cooling slots underneath the machine, but I find it hard to believe the pedestal is purely cosmetic.

FYI even though my case unlocked I brought home the keys to my xw8200 and they did indeed work with the lock on the C8000. My keys are labeled "301". Could be good to know if you want to pick up some keys for it.

Congrats! I wouldn't have guessed it'd be so easy to hook it up to a 1600SW, but the FireGL seems like a very solid and flexible framebuffer. Still, mixing an SGI 1600SW with a HP C8000 seems kind of naughty...


I had specifically asked if the foot was included prior to buying since my seller only used a stock photo, so maybe that's why he was sure to include it. He said this:

However, I have my doubts since nothing is really heat-sunk to the floor of the chassis and the large HDD fan blows intake air right over it. The bottom C-shaped "feet" probably keep it up off the floor enough if airflow is really needed; the only benefit to having the larger foot is that the tower probably will slide around since the C's don't have rubber or anything on the bottom of them.

The guy I bought it from did send me the chassis key a week later (in a very large fedex box, strangely enough), so it can't hurt to ask him if he will send/sell you the foot. It sounded like he had a few C8000's to offload.

Thought I would let you know that I followed your advice and sent the seller a message. I had already left him positive feedback, so when I didn't hear back from him I wasn't too surprised. However, today an enormous box arrived via FedEx with the missing base in it. (The box could have held two complete C8000 workstations plus bases. ) I was quite surprised and pleased! I'm definitely adding him to my favorite sellers list.

Sure... I wasn't talking about just this C8000 really, more about big iron in general. You really wouldn't want to run Linux on a modern Superdome 2 either. Also, to keep the analogy alive... an old pickup truck being driven by a trucker will STILL be better than driven by a toddler


Well, at least the Tru64 I/O stack made it into HPUX. 11.31 is a fuckton better for I/O handling than the earlier versions


True, true. You can always use pkgsrc on UX though, which doesn't have this problem - shameless plug: I posted an article on pkgsrc/UX on my site: http://vanalboom.org/node/17 .

For what it's worth (and for future generations), it turns out that SAM reports the framebuffer as

(under Display->X Server Configuration). Unless the X1 and X3 share the same id, it would appear that HP must've offered the X1 as the high-end graphics option, then later upgraded to the X3 and updated all the documentation to reflect that. Similarly, some documentation suggests that there was a PCI-based low-end graphics option from HP (fxe graphics?) that does not appear in the documentation that lists X3. There must have been two generations of these workstations' graphics options.

It might have been to do with the upgrade from 8800 to 8900 CPUs.

Whoo 777 posts~ go hppa/parisc.

So, what have you been using that monster for?

It's nice and quiet, so I have it out as my living room's UNIX workstation. I tried doing development work on it, but my understanding of HP-UX's libc and the HP compiler are still limited, and I can't get some of my code to compile correctly. It also pulls a lot of power and I've already got to worry about keeping the electric bill down though, so I'm afraid it doesn't see as much use as I'd like.

I'd love to use it more, but I've really got to put the time into figuring out how to build my standard UNIX software stack. Being somewhat of a purist, I'd also like to get the original keyboard/mouse with which the C8000 shipped, but I'm having a very difficult time tracking down any information on them aside from their HP model numbers (which are wholly absent on eBay).

Does anyone know anything about these input devices? I'd like to think that the C8000 shipped with a UNIX-style keyboard, but hell if I can find ANY such keyboards sold by anyone other than Sun (or the Happy Hacking Keyboard).

Hi all...
I'm new in this forum, so... first of all sorry for my english! )
I have 3 pa-risc C8000 boxes with HP-UX MCOE 11.11 standard install and i've some problems:
- with fireGL X3. i need core graphics cd for this card but don't find it over the net.
- dont't find any place were download parches (not from hp itrc)

i've read that a member of this forum, gkl, downloaded "26 gigs of patches "just in case"... well... this is the case
can you tell me were to downoaded this lot of pathes?

last: i try to install debian lenny 5.0.5/6 but displayed out the famous message "boot console ttyB0 - real tty0" but over serial don't dispayed anythung. (someone says to install serial card in pci slot, seems integrated serial do not reconized from linux kernel)

The boxes are:
2xPA8900 1.1 MHZ 64 mb L3 shared (quad core) FireGL X3 256mb 73 Gb scsi HP HDD and 12 GB of ram

1xPA8900 1.0 MHZ 64 mb L3 shared (dual core) FireGL X3 256mb 73 Gb scsi HP HDD and 4 GB of ram

1xPA8800 900 MHZ 32 mb L3 shared (dual core) FireGL T1 128mb 80 Gb IDE HDD and 2 GB of ram

every box runs fine hp-ux 11i v1 with gnome desktop environment

Thanks all for help... if possibile...

You need the HP-UX 11.11 Graphics Technical Computing Environment, which can be dowloaded for free from here:

https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdep ... er=B6268AA

As for HP-UX patches, unless you know or have access to anyone with a support contract, you're pretty much out of luck. Are you also sure you're using the correct parameters for the serial port of the computer acting as a console?

A few things about developing on HP-UX, you need to have the latest patches esp. for the linker and the c-library or trying to compile/port anything moderately modern will fail miserably. Esp. if you want to use a relatively recent version of GCC.

Also, in HP-UX stdarg.h has to be included before stdio.h , it took me ages to figure that one out. But it makes a lot of difference with gnuish code. It is 40 years after, and we're still living with some of the half assed issues induced by C (and later C++).



I assume by "Unix" keyboard, you mean one that the control and caps lock keys swapped, right? In that case, xmodmap is your friend. Shouldn't be too hard to get it working that on HP-UX. However the machine is rather picky about which USB keyboards it likes...

I'm the proud owner of a used, but great condition HP c8000.

Specs:
- Dual Core 1.1Ghz PA-8900
- 6GB RAM
- 2x73GB 10k SCSI HDD
- FireGL X3 256mb graphics card
- DVD-Writer

a few Q:
- it doesn't seem to have an audio card, do I need to buy one? Will only the official HP one work or are there cheaper alternatives?
- it didn't came with a pedestal stand, but already seems stable without one. I'm guessing I won't need to buy one. Is that correct?

Will try to load the operating system this weekend

Congrats! I am quite jealous of your PA-8900; those things always price way out of my budget.

It seems like very few C8000s shipped with audio, and I've never heard of anyone using an audio card in it aside from the one HP shipped. This thread was of some help in trying to figure out the OEM, but as far as I can tell, the C8000 audio card was never sold as anything else. There are a few Philips-branded cards that look very similar that are relatively cheap when they pop up on eBay, but they use different audio chips and I have no idea if the HP-UX drivers will recognize them.

As far as the pedestal is concerned, I'm pretty sure it's purely cosmetic. It does make the machine less tippy and more sexy, but it doesn't help cooling or anything else out.

Nice machine!

My two C8000s have audio cards. There are two versions of this card - one that has 'stereo out' (part number AB620A) , and one that has 'headphone out' (part number AB620-60503). Stereo out means you still need to feed it to an amplifier to get anything out of it... guess which of the two I have but regardless, sound on UX is not that important. The UX tools for audio are terrible, and afaik SDL is the only open source sound library that is supposed to work.

The pedestal is optional - it's just a plastic foot you click on to the tower. It does look pretty though.

No, the "Unix" layout typically refers to placement of the Control key in it's correct and natural position, somewhere to the left of the A key, where God and Nature intended it to be.

It was only around the introduction of the PC/AT that the ergonomic nightmare of moving it to the bottom row of the keyboard was introduced. Suddenly the incidence of debilitating carpal tunnel problems shot skyward, and people started to believe taking thrice as long "mousing" was preferable to using keyboard accelerators or shortcuts. It's amazing how things that a few seconds using character mode Word Perfect started taking minutes when people found it physically painful to use their damned keyboards...

Anyway my apologies for not clearing this up back in July. I must have been suffering from a critical insufficiency of strong drink at the time.

thunng8 , gkl :

Info update Hope that will help you and other seekers of audio-option for C8000.

New guy here so be gentle

In regards to the sound board chip it's a "cm18738" (at least the board I'm looking at) if that helps anybody out.