[nycbug-talk] NetBSD and HP RISC (was Re: Charles M. Hannum on NetBSD)

[N.J. Thomas]

* michael <lists at genoverly.net> [2006-08-31 09:02:40 -0400]:
> wow.. this has hit several lists, but if you missed it somehow..
> 
> 	"The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance.

Ca. 2004 a friend of mine gave me a monstrous HP RISC workstation (whose
exact model number escapes me at the moment). I was fairly proficient
with FreeBSD and OpenBSD at that point, and I'd been on the lookout for
an excuse to play with NetBSD. This machine with its esoteric
architecture seemed like the perfect fit, after all, NetBSD ran on
everything, right?

Well, oddly enough, it didn't on this one. This particular HP series had
only an experimental NetBSD port and a bit of digging through the
archives showed that calling it "experimental" was being optimistic at
best -- but both OpenBSD (hppa) and Linux (PARISC) had native, fully
supported ports.

I ended up having to move from the state, so I had to give the machine
away to someone (it weighed about 150 pounds), but I always found it
suspicious that the OS that purported to run on everything wouldn't work
on this particular architecture which really didn't seem all that exotic
to me.

Thomas

-- 
N.J. Thomas
njt at ayvali.org
Etiamsi occiderit me, in ipso sperabo