Hello! I happen to posses an old "Big Sur" machine manufactured by Intel, based around two Itanium (Merced) CPU's and a 460GX chipset. The machine is labeled as an "enginnering sample" (label: http://ishells.net/spy/itanium/DSC00873.jpg), and looks identical to the HP i2000 workstation (picture: http://ishells.net/spy/itanium/DSC00880.jpg). I have faced a problem of getting an operating system for it. Namely, Linux. I have tried installing both Debian 3.0r6 Woody and Debian 4.0r1 Etch, however, the CD kernel doesn't succeed to boot. Somewhere after probing for USB and SCSI devices, the video signal is lost (monitor switches into a stand-by mode), and nothing else happens. Since I'm using some old Matrox graphics card, I thought it could be a problem with framebuffer, but disabling the framebuffer didn't help. On the Debian website, it's stated that there could be problems due to old BIOS/firmware versions. Here's what I've got: BIOS: W460GXBS2.86E.0117C.P09.200108091154 SMBIOS: 2.3.1 PAL (A/B): 6623/6625 SAL (A/B): 101/101 Boot Block: 30 There are BIOS and firmware updates for i2000 available on the HP website, but I'm not sure if they are compatible with my machine, and am afraid of damaging either BIOS or firmware at updating attempt. Do you reckon it is safe to update? What else would you suggest me to do about my machine to succeed with Linux installation? And is it possible to run HP-UX 11i (probably v1.5/1.6/2.0) on it? Thanks in advance, Alexei Gerasimov. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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