Guillaume Laures wrote:
|   Well I 'won' an hp apollo 400 series, which turns out to be a 425e.
| 
|     *BUT* I don't know much about this machine, have found no doc so far 
| and I need to know : 
|   if SCSI (1.4 MB/s) or SCSI II (5MB/s) hard drives should be used (it came 
| empty),
|   what type of RAM modules should be installed (FPM/EDO, how many ns, it 
| came with none),
|   if some people is working on the console (and what type of screen is 
| applicable ? is it a standard PC VGA connector like it seems, but (with no 
| RAM there is nothing on my screen)

A SCSI-1 or SCSI-2 disk may be used.  It must have a 50-pin header connector.
One problem: newer SCSI drives may not work correctly without a kernel patch,
and even with the kernel patch, you can't boot from them.  See PR#3769 in
the NetBSD bug database for more information.

A workable solution is to boot from one of the Rodime drives, then use the
kernel patch in PR#3769 if necessary to get a new, high capacity disk working.

The memory is HP proprietary; standard PC simms cannot be used.  You will
have to shop around for it; it's rare to see it available on the open market.

I'm not sure what type of frame buffer you have, but the systems I've seen
do not connect to a standard VGA monitor.  Rather, they have three BNC
connectors that connect to a fixed-frequency monitor.

|   I 'won' (actually my engineer school got rid of them) too another 400 
| series, a 400t this time with two RODIME RO300T hard drives/32MB. Is it a 
| better deal under netbsd right now ? I can hook various videocards from VME 
| (graphics bus or N&B) to MultiBus ( big big color Matrox or a color 
| multiple L1A2793 w/ Bt RAMDAC). The problem here is that I have a 
| fixed-frequency apollo monitor (seems to be 1152*870@80Hz from various 
| tries on my mac) but the videocards don't seem to provide appropriate 
| timings... how do I change them ?

I am not aware that HP400 machines are capable of supporting either VME or
MultiBus.  The framebuffer socket is also proprietary.

There is no easy way to change the scan frequency of your Apollo monitor to
work with these systems.

Are you sure that you're not confusing these machines with a Domain 5500
system?  These have ISA buses, but are not compatible with anything, and
NetBSD won't run on them (yet).  The HP 425s run NetBSD quite well.


Si vous avez d'autres questions, veuillez me les poser en francais, par
courrier electronique.