The collected works of the1

I too have an HP B2000. I ran HP-UX for a while and found it to be buggy, have broken package management and have little freeware available. I reformatted and installed Debian linux. But.....the built in video card is unsupported in linux except in text mode....so I ordered a vid card that should work. Lately I've been using an sgi indy (24bit XL) with X11 forwarding to display the b2000's graphics, its not a bad system for a temporary hack. If anyone would like to try out that system I offer free shells on it. Check out http://the1.no-ip.com for more info.

Overall I definitly perfer both linux and Irix over HP-UX, and the built in graphics on the B2k were nothing special either. Design wise machine does look powerfull: it has a cool front pannel mini-lcd, lots of space inside, and a giant cylindrical heat sync on the PA-8500. The 8500 with 1.5 meg cache probably has the best price/performance ratio or any RISC I've seen out there. In intiger performance, It's equilivant to maybe a PIII 500mhz. Floating point wise, you would have to go over a ghz on an x86 to match it. Bus bandwidth wise, I bet the B2000 is closer to a PC than an SGI.

Are either of your two octanes still up for sale or
trade? Do you have any TRAM for the gfx cards or
other goodies to tack on?

I would give an HP B2000 (You can get it with HP-UX or
debian, whatever you would want I'll install it). It
has both fxe and ATI RAGE XL graphics.
http://members.rogers.com/unixhq/B2000.pdf
If you think the system you have is worth more than
the b2000, I can make up the difference within reason.
(I'd like to keep the cost lower than the latest from
xs international for a similar system):
-------------------------
Refurbished SGI Octane SE
R12K 300MHz/2MB Cache
512MB Memory
18GB Disk
Keyboard, mouse and power cord kit
30-Day Warranty

Price: $300 USD
http://www.xsnet.com/sgi/octane/featured
---------------

I have obsolete computers (plenty of sgi indys) and
other hardware (police scanners, stereo equiptment,
various computer parts) if your interested in that
kinda thing too.

email: mailto:[email protected]

I'm pritty sure the fx2 is not supported in Linux. I might still be intrested (if I re-install HP-UX and do a dual boot, using another drive, but that would require getting another SCSI-3 drive...and I kinda wanna save up my computing budget for an Octane2 v8 or v12) I did look at the site you mentioned for freeware, and your right, there is some out there, and I could get most gnu stuff working with a bit of effort, but there just isn't as much out there as there is for Linux or Irix in both freeware and commericial software. I used 11i, perhaps I screwed up somewhere in the installation, but package management seamed eternally borken for one reason or another. I often ended up unpacking the .depot files by hand or with shellscripts I made.