Slashdot Mirror
HP Announces Linux High-End Workstations
montezuma writes "HP announced their high-end Visualize
workstations running Red Hat. " That XL550 looks
pretty spiffy. But its nice seeing that they're doin' it.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
[The password mechanism seems to be flummoxed yesterday and today - or I'd sign in with a 'real' account.]
My significant other spent a year of graduate school at the University of London. The place was so disorganized that no one in the administration even knew where the particular faculty members she most hoped to study with had their offices. It took her two months of constant asking around to find those offices. But then this was 15 years ago. No doubt the influx of computers there now serves as a prosthesis for the missing parts of the British brain.
[What was the topic? Gee, good thing the Create Account system is down.]
don't forget the Deskjet 820Cse series.. I still need a driver for this paperweight.
But it still crashes :) It's kind of like they're saying they can't stop sales of NT so they might as well sell it too.
Quite! Glad someone agrees with me
Nope London Uni is a nightmare still.....
Partially it's designed that way...bear in mind the lecturers aren't like yours....they are there for research not students.....Aside from that London is just that way, people sink or swim....for the latter you have to make a fuss and identify an individual...make it their problem...don't let a beuracracy get you..........Still that's London in general it has a special sort of atmosphere.most people hate it...some like it..I do...
Call me when they have Linux drivers for their printers.
When there are new security holes in 2.0.36, remember that 2.0.37 is the latest 2.0.x kernel.
In a few million years, anthropologists will be digging up HP equipment that will STILL be working.
I've had the pleasure of working on a few Kayaks, which the Visualize PC's are based on. They're a pain in the ass to work inside, but what other vendors use plastic ducts to blow air directly over the CPU's? Or has a dedicated fan blowing air directly across the drives (which Seagate has ALWAYS said was required but nobody ever does...). Or has ANOTHER fan dedicated to cooling expansion slot cards? (Todays graphics cards get hot)
That overengineering doesn't come cheap, though. Anybody who thinks HP computers are expensive hasn't dropped sixty grand on a MIDRANGE piece of test equipment......
They have given a really lame reason for only installing Redhat Linux imho.
It's no advantage for Linux if venders will only install something from Redhat.
Or will HP be installing other Linux distros upon request and just hasn't said so on their site?
My cousin went to work for a international new organization in London. I spent a couple weeks over there.
Nice place to visit..
No offense but Old England is ass backwards. Go to a bank, one computer terminal in the back. Checks drawn at the same bank don't clear the same day, unless they're drawn at the same branch.
Customer Service?
Anything you do there is an administrative nitemare.
They have cameras everywhere that watch you, speed cams on the highway that bag speeders without due-processes.
They even have a class system.. and inbred germans acting like royalty..
Give me a break. Name one major computer system that came out england.."Acorn computers" give me a break..
Ok I think Lemmings came out of england and it was great, and ARM chips, but what else.
London is a great city except for the english.. Most of them don't even try.
I shouldn't have even responded to this flamebate. And for those in england that think they wouldn't be speaking german without US help, get a history book.
Like that comment is really going to get it moderated up, hmm?
Well this is a standalone initiative from
:)
a guy located in the next building
He has been a little bit desapointed
by the spammed poeple reaction, and
his management is really desapointed
too
While they are doing Linux support, please port the HP JetAdmin and Web JetAdmin software to Linux. They ported Web JetAdmin to OS/2, for crying out loud.
And do the same for the 10/100TX to parallel adapters, too.
Anyone else have to chuckle everytime they hear those HP ads for "...HP workstations running the unstoppable Windows NT..." ?? It just makes me laugh every time I hear it. Maybe they'll start running Linux ads. Prolly not, but it would sure be nice.
There is a beta driver for Permedia2 based cards.. more information at http://www.suse.de/~sim/mlx.html
Also, Precision Insight is using 3dlabs hardware for their sample implementation. They demoed it on a 3DLabs GMX 2000 at Linux Expo.
Posted by skaffster:
Firstly, Linux still has a long way to go in certain areas before it comes anywhere near commercial unices. For example, disk volume management, transaction filesystems and a half-decent NFS implementation.
Secondly, the PA8500 will not be the last of the PA-RISC line. HP can see Merced going down the tubes, and there's still plenty of legroom left in the PARISC design.
"End task" just doesn't work!
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
Why can't people sell their Real Machines with Linux? They worked with those Wacky Canucks to port Linux to the PA-RISC, the 8500 w/1.5MB on-chip cache is faster than fast, so why not ditch the skanky old HP-sUX and sell Linux on it?
Hey, they could even enhance Linux a little! It's not like anyone in their right mind wants to run a commercial Unix on a workstation anymore. (oh alright, maybe Irix or Solaris, but not HPUX)
The PA-RISC is a weird but well-engineered chip, and the 8500 is the last of them AFAIK... it would be nice to walk up to some random Linux box in a couple of years and discover it was running That 64-bit Chip That Got Steamrolled By Intel.
Oh well, at least Intel isn't as evil as MS... instead of just destroying HP's stuff and forcing more x86 (the architectural equivalent of BASIC) down everyone's throats, they're actually sticking their necks out and producing something that works. Maybe. In the second generation...
Meanwhile the PA-RISC chips work fine already.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I guess I'm just boasting but why pay their
:) ;).
:o).
huge price.
My new toy is nearly built and it should eat
the 550xl for way less.
Dual 666 mhz P III (already there
Alpha coolers - direct outside air to coolers
ducted from air cleaner
HSDRAM 4.5 ns at 133mhz (maybe 140 we'll see)
Scsi U2wide (the 500xl has fast wide) 9 gig
I think the G400 for a card (nice to have JC
working on this
I built my last machine three years ago, a PPro
at 233 (a 180 really). I properly cooled it and
she's still up, (she's been down, for hardware, kernels and upgrades only).
Why pay for the name, hell might as well run..
... I won't mention that name here.
CC
My point is build yer own, ain't that what we
suposed to be doing
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
HP has also started spamming for their Linux Courses. I've received three different propositions today from hp.com.
They really behave like flies attracted by fresh flesh... disgusting.
-- "Life is easier since I have excluded JonKatz stories from my homepage"
I know Micros~1 and IBM techies roam in here as well...
Just wondering...
Today's English Lesson: Oxymorons
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
pot? kettle?
How can an american criticise the UK when he probably can't find it on a map? pah!
Jeez, at least we have a legal system that isn't laughable. Oh and Monopoly control that works.(except for untilities like BG/T/R).
As for what we did for computers:
Manchester Encoding,
Turing,
Babbage,
Ada,
Alan Cox,
Sinclair Research,
Manchester University,
Cambridge University,
Archimedes,
Acorn,
Edgar Allan Poe,
HP Lovecraft,
(where would UNIX culture be with out great literiture),
Radio,
Telegram,
Telecoms,
Leo (worlds first commercially used computer).
Then you've got Switzerland that gave us hypertext, LSD, merchant banking.
Scandinavia gave us Tannenbaum & Torvalds.
There would be no networks (let alone internet), no silicon valley, no linux, no hypertext and no high quality artificial hallucinigens wihtout us 'unimportant' europeans.
A.
Intranet/Internet Developer & Linux Advocate
what about their PA-RISC machines ??
Alan cox has a machine in his study and belive me HP-UX sucks as a user O/S
not bad as a server tho
come on HP sort it out I would love to see what happens when they sort out a compiler for these PA-RISC machine 450MHz and 64 bit with prediction like IA64
do it HP crush M$ and sort out linux
HP is one of the BIG boys and they all seem to go to HP for their research when it all goes pear
like with intel and IA-64
ah well in for a long wait but go to Trimaran to see what compilers should be doing !
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
On this page: http://www.hp.co m/visualize/products/plclass/tech_specs/index.html it says that these machines have
an "HP Multifunction Ergonomic Keyboard with programmable application shortcuts".
Now I have a keyboard just like that. (It came with an hp brio.) It's really neat, it has ten extra buttons plus volume mute/inc/dec (that's three more), but I haven't gotten them to do anything besides giving error messages to the log.
Does anyone know where I can get the program they use to support them? Does it handle that cute little fourth LED that's supposed to indicate new mail?
Please let me know!
scum that we are, cruising along at -1 . . .
anyway . . . one argument says "the bankers" won the war of independance. Another won says "the bankers" won the second world war.
another argument says that the english bankers own the not just the bank of england, but also the US federal reserve.
Sometimes I just love the gutter . . .
They're just a bit proud of them though. Too rich for me. =)
> remember that unlike x86s, PA-RISC has only
:-)
> ever has HP-UX running on it
NEXTSTEP ran on the HPPA architecture until release 4.1 (or was it 4.2?
-- Aris
It makes me wonder....
When every systems vendor and their dogs jumped on the NT bandwagon (rolls along 22 hours a day, six days a week) all except for Sun, the Sun folks were proud to say they were the only vendor they stayed the course on Open Systems. (meanwhile I was pulling my hair out with SunOS to Solaris migration, but that's another story).
Now it's 5 odd years later and Lo! Systems vendors are hopping on another bandwagon, and its an Open one to boot! But where is Sun? Maybe they're spouting lip service but can I order a Sun box with Linux pre-loaded?
I work with Solaris as a career and I think it's a great server OS, but it annoys me as a desktop. Sure, if work would let me replace CDE with something else (no preference indicated) and pile on a pile of OSS tools, maybe I'd be less annoyed.
And so it stands. Sun is work and Linux is tech hobby. Sun does not support my tech hobby while everyone else seems to be only too eager to come along for the ride.
IBM Dell, HP, SGI: they're already on board. Will Sun be the last?
-MikeR-
Oh yeah, they used Linux powered PA-RISC systems to calculate ballistic tables during the War. How silly of me to have forgotten.
> And for those in england that think they wouldn't be speaking german without US help, get a
> history book.
Fine advice for all, including Yanks (and I'm not a Brit). The _fact_ of the matter is, by time the US got involved in the war, the Brits and their Commonwealth allies had already fought off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and had sunk enough U-Boats to keep those supplies coming in from their suppoerter across the Atlantic, Canada.
The US helped to _win_ the war, _after_ the Brits, Kiwis, Aussies, Canucks and others beat themselves and the Germans bloody while maintaining one safe haven in Europe: the UK. The Yanks entered a 3 year old war nice and fresh and helped to end it. BTW, if the UK had been beaten during the first 3 years of the war, the US would have had no safe haven in which to build up its forces.
Go read that history book now, and maybe read one that wasn't printed in the US. Those all show the US doing it single handedly. Not true in the slightest, whatever you may think.
There now I'm off topic.
I have seen very few PII 400+es that do not have a plastic duct right over the cpu. And most graphics cards today have heatsinks +fans (Voodoo 3 3000 has a heatsink bigger than a low end PII one)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Its an ELSA GLoria card. If its Permedia-based, it is probably the Synergy. When hooked up to HP's gigibit networking, these things FLY.
They are using a Permedia2 based card which is a
nice OpenGL-card for non-games software,
atleast in NT. I hope that 3dlabs get there act
together and will start making sure their hardware
will be hardware-accelerated in XFree86.
Wouldn't mind getting a Oxygen-card
for use with Maya ( I just hope AW will port it someday).
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Posted by Buffy the Overflow Slayer:
I get the impression that HP, like SGI, is using Linux as their IA-32 Unix. I also noticed that their Linux boxes graphics have hardware 3-D support for OpenGL. It sounds interesting.
-buffy
I used to work for HP in both their 'Computer Products' org that makes PC's, etc & 'Professional Services' org that does tech consulting. That's why I still troll thru their web pages occasionally.
It appears that HP now considers Linux a 'supported operating system' which means that all
the seperate divisions will do what they think
is right for the Linux marketplace. This means
stuff like bundling Linux on x86's, providing end-user phone support, ensuring device drivers
are available, providing consulting services (there'll be a special group of consultants formed to do this) and generally incorporating Linux into what they do for other operating systems.
The day it becomes 'strategic' tho is probably
still a ways off for them. That will happen when
the PA-RISC system folks announce support for it - remember that unlike x86s, PA-RISC has only ever has HP-UX running on it.
Interestingly, SGI with Belluzzo, an ex-HP'er, seems to have picked up Linux much more quickly
and are doing more innovative things like XFS source, etc.