[TriLUG] Linux on Alpha...

[Clay Carley]

>  Is there anyone on the list running either or another distribution 
>  on an Alpha that could give me a few pointers or caveats?

Hi Mike,

I've got two Alpha machines:
Digital Personal Workstation 433, which I use everyday
Digital server 5000, for experimental purposes.

Both of these machines were set up to run Windows NT at first, but on boot up 
(if you have the same problem) you just have to go into the BIOS setup (F2 I 
think), and then go into advanced settings (F6 I think) to change to boot 
UNIX.  

To get Debian installed, I only downloaded the net-boot disk images.  After 
booting off the disks, the Debian install went rather well, although it is an 
old installer.  You have to go through each step manually sometimes.  At the 
time, Sarge did not work but Woody installed easily.  I kind of messed up the 
boot process on my workstation by removing the SCSI card at one time- the 
UNIX console forgot it was there at that point and I can't boot from the hard 
drive anymore.  Luckily, it does boot from either the IDE drive or the floppy 
drive still.

I did try an early release of Alpha Core as well.  The install on that was 
troublesome.  I had to make the partitions on the drive first, as well as 
formatting and making swap before installing.  The install would just not 
start the swap, and error out causing a reboot anyway.  When it was all done, 
I had a nice distro based on Fedora Core 2 on the drive, but the bootloader 
didn't install...

I was not able to boot from the CD drive on the server, so I am still unable 
to try FC2 on these machines.  It looks like it should work nicely though.  I 
do like the Debian Woody distro, however there are some packages that will 
not work, so you just have to compile them.  Another interesting trick is 
getting mainstream software on these machines.   Luckily most everything is 
open source, for instance Firefox.  To use Firefox I just download the latest 
source and compile.  It does not take long ;-)

Good luck with this- these are great machines, as well as more secure (who 
writes virus code that runs on 64-bit RISC chips?).  If you have any more 
questions, don't hesitate to e-mail me and I'll try my best to help out.

Clay Carley