The HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre was established in August 1992 in the Department of Computer Science at Liverpool University in the United Kingdom, but has been run by Liverpool-based Connect Internet Solutions Limited since 1995. Its primary aim is to make public domain, freeware and Open Source software more readily available to users of Hewlett-Packard UNIX systems.
I’m about to buy a HP-UX workstation for OSAlert (become an OSAlert Patreon if you want to help!) since I’ve found an amazing deal, so I’ve been diving into the – to me – unknown world of HP-UX. I stumbled upon this software archive, which could prove to be quite useful to other people considering snapping up an old HP-UX workstation.
I didn’t use HP-UX for ‘real work’ but – did use this when I similarly bought a PA-RISC some time ago. Programmes like this, or sunfreeware – made unix (r) palatable, to those that learnt their not-unix on GNU tools.
It’s possible to take it too far, I would put forward – if you’re replacing, everything with ported tools. I might incline to withholding that temptation.
Though I wonder if the built in df ever was updated to handle the -h flag. It drove me so crazy, I wrote my own wrapper. To this day i’ve a uname -s case for HP-UX in my .zshrc – which would have been available because of HP-UX PAC.
Take a look on HP Software Depot (https://myenterpriselicense.hpe.com/cwp-ui/free-software).