Running NEXTSTEP 3.3 PARISC on an HP Apollo 9000 Model 712

5. September 2009, 22:57

A few years ago I bought this nice small PA-RISC machine made by Hewlett Packard in the early nineties on eBay….. It is an HP Apollo 9000 Model 712 and had HP/UX 10.20 preinstalled but I really was interested to see it in action as an alternative to a NeXTSTEP Box…

My HP 712 Box has the following configuration:

  • PA-RISC 7100LC 80 MHz
  • 64 MB RAM
  • 2 × 2 GB Harddisks
  • Video-RAM expansion

here is a very detailed description of its architecture …

Let’s take a look inside:

Inside the HP 712 gecko

Here is HP/UX 10.20 in action:

running HP/UX 10.20 on the gecko

Although I also had the NextStep CD needed for installation and the CD even booted on the machine – it got stuck somewhere – as can be seen here:

Inside the HP 712 gecko

After some reading e. g. here , here and here

I realised, that my SCSI CDROM – a Teac RS56 – was not capable of a certain feature, namely to read 512 byte sectors instead of the usual 2048 byte sectors.

If you see the following error message (“request timeout…”) you have the wrong CDROM drive…

Inside the HP 712 gecko

I finally found a list of old CDROM models which should be able to do so and recently bought an Apple CDROM 600i off eBay with the hope that it would let me set a “jumper” to enable the 512 byte sector mode.

Apple CDROM 600i

Well it did not have such a jumper but I nevertheless tried to install NextStep again – and it worked!!!

This is the result:

Inside the HP 712 gecko

Now I’ve got a nice Nextstep workstation which runs Nextstep flawlessly and is surprisingly fast while doing so! I know this because a few years back I bought an original Next box from a fellow student which turned out to be the black and white 17 inch model and it was quite slow altough it is supposedly faster than NextStep Cube with its 16,7 Million colours…..

muid

my Projects, nextstep tags: , , ,

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Unofficial Aging Tabs 0.7.1.5 - Firefox Extension

29. July 2009, 00:56

Unofficial Aging Tabs 0.7.1.5: Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab – and more!

This extension is based on Aging Tabs 0.7.1: created by Dao Gottwald

This is useful if you always have a lot of tabs open – you can see at once which of those are not so popular and may decide to close them.

I extended this extension to automatically close the oldest tabs and even bookmark them with a specific tag so that you can get back to them later!

Some screenshots:

Aging Tabs 0.7.1.1 Images

Changelog:
2011/11/12 in Unofficial Aging Tabs 0.7.1.5:

  • added option to prevent closing already bookmarked tabs – keep your favorite tabs open at all times
  • added the option to query delicious.com to suggest tags for the tab which should be closed
  • is now compatible with Firefox 8.0, 9.0b1 and 10a1

2011/08/07 in Unofficial Aging Tabs 0.7.1.4:

  • is now also compatible with Firefox 5.0

2010/07/28 in Unofficial Aging Tabs 0.7.1.3:

  • is now also compatible with Firefox 4.0

2010/04/25 in Unofficial Aging Tabs 0.7.1.2:

  • added a Toolbar button to easily reset aging data (useful if the killtabs option is active and you want to prevent tabs from being closed automatically in the near future…)
  • is now also compatible with Firefox 3.7

2009/07/28 in Unofficial Aging Tabs 0.7.1.1:

  • added option to close tabs automatically
  • added option to bookmark the tabs before closing
  • added German translation for my changes

muid

agingTabs, my Projects tags: , , , , ,

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Unofficial Foxylicious 0.7.2.1 - Firefox Extension

28. March 2009, 13:33

Unofficial Foxylicious 0.7.2.1: can import your Online Bookmarks from delicious.com and export your Firefox bookmarks to delicious.com

Some screenshots:

foxylicious 0.7.2 Images

Changelog:

2009/09/05 in Foxylicious 0.7.2.1a:

  • Uploaded install package was broken

2009/07/26 in Foxylicious 0.7.2.1:

  • integration with the Import/Export Menu should work now.
  • normalize Tags on export should work
  • cleaned up options window
  • added German translation

2009/03/23 in Foxylicious 0.7.2:

  • added support for “tags”
  • now you can also export your Firefox Bookmarks to delicious.com
  • now integrates with the Import/Export Menu of the “Organize Bookmarks” window

Things that don’t work yet:

  • enable Daily updates, only works for import and probably won’t work reliably
  • sometimes the selected folder is not saved….

This version is not well tested – so be careful…

Foxylicious 0.7.2.1: is based on an unoffical Foxylicious 0.7.1 by Jesse Kuhnert which itself is based on the original Foxylicious version 0.7 by Dietrich Ayala

muid

my Projects, tags: , , , , ,

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Retriever for Marvin 0.3.1

29. July 2002, 12:53

Well here is Marvin’s Retriever. Mhmm. What is there to say. He has been programmed for the Presentation Manager of OS/2 and more or less does what he should.

Marvin’s Retriever is a download helper application similar to Netscape’s Smartdownload but not as powerful yet. He is able to fetch Urls from the clipboard and to pause and resume download jobs. He is also quite informative about the condition of the present download. And that is about it already. This isn’t too much, and the real job is being made by GNU wGet because this program has proven to be quite reliable and because I didn’t want to spend too much time writing this small utility.

Here are some screenshots:

Retriever Images

Requirements:
IBM OS/2 Warp 4.0 or higher, eComStation 1.0 or higher
EMX 0.9d

It can be downloaded here:

retrievr031zip.zip

And here is the sourcecode:

retrievr031src.zip

Both GNU wGet and Marvin’s Retriever are licensed under GNU GPL 2, which can be found here: GPLv2

muid

my Projects, tags: , , , ,

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