[plug] AS/400 and Linux

[Mark Bailey]

Hi Hennie,

I don;t know if you can tell from this scrap of information but it is a 
2290 with OS/400 R 5.2

Cheers,
Mark Bailey


Hennie Strydom wrote:

>On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 08:47 +0800, Peter Tran wrote:
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>>Bret Busby wrote:
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>>A friend and I were donated two rather large AS/400's (and boy are those
>>things are heavy! 300kg of computing gear sure is hard to move on a 38
>>degree day!), we figured that if we could run an instance of Linux on one of
>>the partitions, we might be able to roll in a few more instances (on
>>different partitions) and have all our Linux machines running concurrently
>>at a co-located site.
>>
>>Having that been said, it's really just a learning experience.
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>
>>From a learning experience point of view I would also like to be
>involved, but what you describe here sounds like the much older CISC
>processor AS/400's.  From what I can recall (and note that I was never
>an expert on these systems, and have not worked on them for many years)
>this hardware had limitations that would make running Linux on it quite
>difficult.  It came as a bundle of hardware and OS/400, and the raw
>hardware had only a single address space and no concept of user and
>kernel mode.  Also the CISC processor was about as capable as a P1.
>
>I might be wrong in my diagnosis and interpretation of the facts, and
>stand open to correction, but if you have a large black AS400 the width
>and depth of a rack about 1.6M high you likely have the CISC model.  On
>the other hand, if it is only about 90cm high it could be a RISC model,
>which should run Linux nicely.  (I never tried to lift either beast
>[value my back intact] so I could be very wrong about the weight.)  This
>obviously is the worst way to determine OS/400 model specifics, and I
>had experience in a limited variety of models, so I could be wrong even
>if it is a huge box.
>
>If it looks viable, count me in.
>
>Regards
>  Hennie
>
>
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