DEC Alpha Status

Insanity5902 · Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2008 3:37 pm Post subject: DEC Alpha Status

Is there still development with gentoo on these? Is there a need for more machines?

I might be able to get my hands on one (maybe two) and was just wondering.
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alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

i am not a gentoo dev, but a gentoo/alpha user.
what hardware could you get your hands on?
gentoo/alpha is definitely in use.

mattst88 · Developer Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 423

Absolutely. Gentoo development is still quite alive for the Alpha. Get your hands on those boxes

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Insanity5902 · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 3:15 am Post subject:

The first is an Alpha Station 400 4/233
The second is a Personal Workstation 433a
The last is a Server 3000

Seems to be the older 233 - 400 mhz alpha machines. I know nothing about this architecture, are these still good?
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alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

the architecture is very interesting indeed.

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ran a wide range of operating systems, incl. windows nt :lol:

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read the wikipedia article.

i use a alphapc 600 as a firewall / router.
the alphapcs are ATX format, use ATX PSUs, keyboard and mouse and SDRAM memory and have normal PCI slots.
everthing is like a pc, except the CPU.
one thing that is not easy to modify is the cpu cooling, since two screws stick out of the CPU.

the ones you have are maybe a bit slow for gentoo, you may want to set up crossdev and distcc.
did you get any software with them?

Insanity5902 · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 11:44 am Post subject:

I don't have them yet, I just know that they all turn on and boot up into VMS.

The original owner wasn't able to get them to boot from a cd-room, so he played with VMS and is passing them on.
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alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

well... booting from cdrom is normally done by boot <device>.
you can list the devices with show devices.
in my case it is dqb0, but it will most likely be a different name in your case, because most alpha systems have a SCSI cdrom and mine has a ATAPI.
with the SRM console (that you will have at the moment) you can boot VMS, Tru64, Linux, *BSD.
if you want to run windows nt or w2k beta (and believe me, it's fun), you need to replace SRM with the ARC firmware.

mattst88 · Developer Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 423

Those are older EV4 and EV5 models. I'm not saying they're useless, but using Gentoo on Alpha systems older than EV56s will be painful.

It would be a fun experiment though, which, for me, is the real reason for using an Alpha.
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