Porting to Debian HPPA Linux?

This is a long shot, but I’m wondering if Nethserver could be ported to Debian 8 HPPA Linux as a full install package (x64 of course)? Debian is pretty stable as servers go, and over the last few years, the developers of the HPPA port of Debian have gotten it very stable. Debian, unfortunately dropped support for HPPA in 2009, due to lack of developers/porters, but since then, two developers in particular have brought it back out of the dark, and we currently have over 8500 packages available. Most of the machines don’t support graphics (with the exception of the C8000, which uses the ATI FireGL-UX card). HP is reluctant to release code on their other graphics cards, but it’s not a big issue, as most of these machines were aimed at the server market with the exception of the J-series Visualize workstations and a few others. They can all be accessed via serial console connection, and PUTTY, WinSCP, and others, remotely, once the OS is installed.

From what I’ve seen, they are extremely fast considering the low clock speed of the PA-RISC architecture, and I think they would be well suited for a gateway or standalone with NethServer. My J6750 has dual 875 mhz. CPU’s, and runs more like a 2.2 GHZ intel-based machine. :smile:

I will talk to the developers for HPPA and see what they think. I have already had a full LAMP server on this machine running Joomla, as an informational blog site, in addition to 2 running buildd servers, and it’s always been fast to access. Unfortunately, it lost it’s primary HDD a few days ago, and I just got it back online earlier this evening with a new drive, and one of the developers already has the buildd server up and working again. Fortunately, we had his /home directory with the buildds on a secondary drive! (These generally use U320 10 or 15K SCSI drives up to 146GB. each).

Any thoughts on this from @alefattorini @filippo_carletti or others? Thanks!

Dave Land
Land Computer Service

Porting to a different package system (deb) it’s a lot of work. Is there an rpm -> deb converter? Anyone experinced using Alien?
The arch is a minor problem, since most NethServer packages are arch independent.

Yes, that was basically the same response I got from the developers at HPPA. I think Debian actually does support converting/installing RPM’s, but they would most likely have to be modified extensively to suit the HPPA architecture. Maybe something will be developed in the near future to allow this to be accomplished a little bit easier. Thanks for the reply Filippo! :wink:

Dave Land
Land Computer Service