Free Linux for H50

[Jay D Koonz]

I have an old (obviously) H50 server that I'd like to install some form of Linux on to play around with. Any recommendations on a free version available out there somewhere ?

[Tom Ward_1]

I don't think you'll have much luck getting linux to run on it. Debian 3.0 offically supports PA-RISC. http://www.parisc-linux.org/index.html

If you check the hardware database
http://hwdb.parisc-linux.org/
you'll see a few nova classes registered. I contacted one gentleman who registered, but he wasn't able to run linux on it. He said it ran 10.20 very nice though.

Read the supported hardware info
http://parisc-linux.org/hardware/supported.html
and you see that the nova class isn't supported and most likely never will be due to lack of info on them.

If you want to run linux on PA-RISC get yourself a nice C-class on e-bay.

Besides Debian, a new distro Gentoo, http://www.gentoo.org/,
is supporting PA-RISC. They're at Release Candidate 4. Haven't yet tried it, but looks nice.

The HP video cards are not well supported under linux. I believe the on-board video for a C-180 works, but you'll have to do some digging to find config info on it. I've gotten the impression that you can plug in a non-HP pci video card when running linux, but I've never tried mixing non-HP parts under linux.

[Tom Ward_1]

Gento is at http://www.gentoo.org

What I ment to say was that X windows under linux is not well supported on HP video cards. They've worked just find for text.