[slightly OT] - HP Envizex X terminals + Linux?
Greetings all,
I am posting this here since there seem to be some HP people on the list and
possibly one may know something about these beasts... anyway...
We (we being the University of Wollongong IEEE student branch - see
http://ieee.uow.edu.au) were recently given a bunch of obsolete HP Envizex
series A X terminals. Opening one up revealed all sorts of interesting things
(i960 processor, what looks like a VME bus, a 16 bit stereo sound card and a
floppy disk drive!) but unfortunately when connected to standard multisync
monitor they caused all sorts of unpleasantness - sync was definitely not
happening. I'm guessing that some strange sort of HP fixed-freq monitor is
required, or at least a sync separator from one. I also know they don't like
Sun monitors, or at least none that I've tried.
Anyway, since the IEEE Student Branch has a fairly decent Linux-based network
already, I was hoping to find a way to use these for something constructive.
As far as I can tell, the chances of actually running Linux on it are zero
(maybe OpenBSD but that seems pretty unlikely). Next best thing would be to
get HP to donate an old copy of the software for these things, and hopefully
give us some info about how to use them with standard PC monitors...
I figured the people around here are more likely than anyone else to know
anything about these beasts, so any light sheddable would be appreciated.
Apologies again for being off-topic. It's not exactly a high-volume list at
present. There may well be some HP-PA boxes from where these things came from
so I'll probably be back again :-)
Thanks,
- Daniel
--
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* Daniel Franklin - Postgraduate student in Electrical Engineering
* University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia * d.franklin@ieee.org
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