HP-UX: Introduction to HP-UX for Solaris Users

HP Workstations run HP-UX, the UNIX Operating System of Hewlett-Packard. HP-UX is an implementation of standard Unix thus, all the Unix commands you know such as ls, cd, mv, rmdir, etc.. function in very much the same way as they did on the Sun machines. There might be some slight changes in the options available and/or the order of parameters but generally, these commands function in very much the same way regardless of the machine you are using. If a command behaves somewhat differently from what you are used to, just consult the man pages for details.

There are some programs which you may have been using on the Sun's which are not on the HP machines. Typically, the contents of /usr/local/bin on the two platforms will be different. If you need an application on the HP which is not available, please send email to antonio@ecn.purdue.edu.

From the user's point of view, the major difference between the Sun and HP machines would be the location of the files (or the file system in general) and the graphical user interface (GUI) which is Openwin for Sun and HP VUE for HP's. There is a new gui, called CDE or the Common Desktop Environment which is supported by both Sun and HP in their new OS releases. CDE is a standard and so will look the same and have similar configuration files across various platforms.

PATH

One of the first things you must do when you start using HP's is to properly set the PATH variable. Add the directories of the applications you will be using (for example, MentorGraphics) to the PATH variable. In general, your PATH variable should contain the following directories:

$PATH = /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/vue/bin:/etc

You should also checkout directories under /opt just to see if there is anything there of interest to you.

Your configuration (environment) files include the following:

$HOME/.login
$HOME/.profile
$HOME/.x11start
$HOME/.X11defaults
$HOME/.mwmrc
$HOME/.vueprofile
$HOME/.vue/sessions
$HOME/.vue/vuewmrc

The last 3 are useful if you are running HP VUE. If you are using CDE on the other hand, then

$HOME/.dtprofile

and files under

$HOME/.dt

are the files you will be interested in.

Please Note that neither CDE nor HP VUE automatically reads your .profile and .login files.

DIRECTORIES

If you still cannot find what you are looking for, the use the find command (consult the man pages).