Hi,

I have recently upgraded my HP 9000 425s to NetBSD 3.0_STABLE,
which went fine, and the machine is currently building some packages
from pkgsrc without problems.

I had used 1.4 and 1.5 on it and always managed to get the Xhpux
Xserver working; I briefly tested 2.x, but never did anything with
it (Framebuffers support on Series 400 machines was quite broken
in 1.6, iirc). I am now planning to revive it properly with 3.x,
but cannot get either Xhpbsd or Xhpux to work.

One problem is that the links on the port-hp300 pages to the Xhpbsd
distribution is outdated, since the directories for 1.5 have now
been moved to NetBSD-archige on the ftp servers. This should be
easily corrected.

The statement that Xhpbsd should "just work" seems no longer to be
true.  I cannot get it to work at all. I always get a segmentation
fault.

The old Xhpux fares slightly better, it sometimes starts (usually
on the third or fourth attempt, the other attempts resulting in
"Bus error" or "Alarm clock"(?) aborts. (This smells like a race
condition.)
O
There seems to be no way to make it work properly with xdm. xdm can
sometimes start the Xserver, but then fails to open the display.

Starting xdm separately telling it to listen to XDMCP requests, but not
to manage a local display directly, and then manually starting the
Xserver with the "-query localhost" or "-query hostname" option results
in several error messages from xdm like this:

  [...]
  waiting for server to start 1
  select returns 1.  Rescan: 0  ChildReady: 0
  ProcessRequestSocket
  header: 1 10 23
  Manage 23
  FindProtoDisplay
  Manage Session ID 62096002, pdpy 0x0
  manage: got duplicate pkt, ignoring
  WaitForSomething
  Before XOpenDisplay(:0)
  After XOpenDisplay(:0)
  OpenDisplay failed 2 (No such file or directory) on ":0"
  [...]

Has anyone on this list succeeded in getting either Xserver to work
on NetBSD-3.x/hp300 and could detail instructions/caveats/pitfalls?

That would be very much appreciated.

On a related note, the ports page says that "all that is needed is
a dedicated programmer" to merge hp300 framebuffer hardware support
into XFree/Xorg.

What exactly is the state of affairs? How much work is it? What is
there? what is missing?


Kind regards,
Bernd

-- 
Bernd Sieker

NetBSD: The Final Frontier
		-- Chris Jones