Installing and using HP-UX 9
13 days ago
- #68K
- #HP-UX
- #vintage-computing
- The author acquired an HP 9000 Model 340 (68030-based) and other vintage UNIX workstations from a generous owner in Cambridge.
- The HP 9000 Model 340 lacks a disk drive and requires network booting or an HP-IB disk drive for operation.
- HP-UX 9 supports mixed 68K and PA-RISC clusters, allowing the Model 340 to network boot from a PA-RISC Model 705.
- Setting up the cluster involved installing HP-UX 9 for both Series 700 (PA-RISC) and Series 300 (68K) architectures on the same machine.
- Context Dependent Filesystems (CDF) in HP-UX 9 enable different binaries for different architectures to coexist in the same filesystem.
- The author fixed a missing library issue in X11R5 by manually creating a CDF for the required file.
- The setup allows running the VUE desktop and classic games like Columns on the 68K UNIX workstation.
- The author plans to showcase these machines at the Retro Computer Festival in November 2026.