Does anyone have any experience in convertinga pre-owned HP workstation (XW6000 series) to linux.

HP supply a kit of CDs but presumably only to customers.

Barry

Short answer: Download the iso (CD image) for your favorite distro, burn a CD, boot from the CD, and install.

According to this, the Linux Cd kit from HP would get you something pretty obsolete:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/q.../11485_na.html

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi barry07

I had a quick look at the machine specs at
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/q.../11485_na.html

On the surface of it, my main concern would be the chipset used for the SCSI controller.
Albeit of different design, I have a number of HP Netservers, which I was only able to run "out of the box" Linux installs from the red Hat 8.0 and 9 era for vanilla Linux releases.
I was unable to install Centos and a number of other later releases (this is going back quite a while), because there was a redesign of the SCSI subsystem where in the older HP Netraid SCSI controllers were obsoleted (ie. dropped from the new driver design).

All in all. It would be a case of install and see with a modern Linux distro.
On the other hand given the cost of EIDE and SATA hard disk drives, you could ditch any SCSI drives (including the optical drive if it is SCSI) and use EIDE or SATA with an inline SATA to EIDE converter (cheap and transparent).

I can see the attraction to using such a machine, if it is one of the higher capability units. However, age, power consumption, and cost of re-fitting may make it a less desirable option that using a more modern hardware platform.

I haven't looked at the HP Linux releases for this era because I found that my HP Netservers worked quite happily with RH 8.0 and 9 (including the SCSI RAID controllers), and I had no need for the remote access/admin hardware features (which I ditched to save power).

Best of luck.
Would be interested, if you proceed, to read what you make of these systems and Linux

C.

PS. Have a really good dig at the HP website, its a really useful resource for researching their old'er hardware.

Way back in 2000 I had a WS5000 with a single 200Mhz Pentium Pro processor and a SCSI drive. (Can't remember the capacity) I loaded Mandrake 8 at the time with very little problem. I added a second Pentium Pro and an old ex IBM RS2000 SCSI drive for my /home partition and all worked fine.
I'd no problem with the SCSI drives. I do remember having fun with the ata CD drive saying it didn't exist latterly and so had to load my OS via a SCSI one.

I'd get a couple of live CDs and check it out with them before deciding what you want to install. I think it should be fine.

Play Bonny!

I'd boot to a live Opensuse live cd to start. It seems to handle most of the raid and scsi chips better. HP tended to offer Suse as a choice.