Adam's Alpha Linux Stuff

My love for the Alpha is a long and sordid affair; I've lusted after it, cheered for it, even used it as a best-in-class case study for my CS550 class. And yet, my only access to them was via my alma mater who has graciously left my old account intact.

Well, that's changed now. I scored an old AlphaServer 1200 on E-bay (dual 533MHz 21164, 512MB RAM) and am about to start playing. Task #1: boot the penguin. Yeah, baby, yeah!

For the time being, this page will be a kind of daylog/diary of getting Linux up and running. It may be useful to those who want to follow in my footsteps.

Friday 8/3/2001

Took delivery of the system. No key for the drive bay, no power cables, just the box. Will contact the seller regarding the key; other than that, I've got mor than enough junk around the apartment to hook the old girl up properly. No time to do so today, however; that's Saturday's deal.

Saturday 8/4/2001

Bought a new WIREtech system to organize my home computer lab; instead of having everything strewn between my desk, bookshelf, and multimedia center (an older WIREtech rig), all the (live) computers (except the Dreamcast) will live in this rig.

The AS1200 powers up just fine - all systems go. Using an old 14" monitor and an old IR wireless keyboard for the console. I'm getting a green light on my network hub too, so the 21140 is probably still alive. (This will make installing Debian much easier...)

Debian Installation Guide: Alpha Architecture (2.2 is the current "stable" for this install)

Notes:

• AS 1200 is a "rawhide" system
• Debian default kernel includes Qlogic ISP and NCR 53c8xx SCSI controllers, which we have.
• The 2nd processor is not supported out-of-the-box; recompile for Alpha SMP
• Some install notes (from 2.1): http://lhpca.univ-lyon1.fr/axp/README

Ok, Debian's install docs thoroughly suck :-) Hoping this is a blocking error for 3.0...

Building Debian distro CDs (2.2) using the pseudo-image kit... slow going, even over DSL. Downloading ISOs would be faster... this is the bottleneck for the evening, probably nothing more until tomorrow after church.

Sunday 8/5/2001

Awesome time in church this morning. I'm pumped up for an evening of hacking! (God loves hackers!)

AS1200 user's guide (full-on) (herafter referenced "UG")

It would be nice if there was a way to boot from AlphaBIOS. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case, as several hours of fidgeting seems to bear out. So now I've switched over to using the SRM console (see pg 4-2 in the UG); problem being, it's misbehaving when we're not doing a cold boot. On warm boots, it doesn't want to do its device probes, and just hangs after printing its banner:

DIGITAL Ultimate Workstation 533au2 Console V5.1-3, 28-JAN-1998 18:14:54

Ok - we're rocking and rolling. "show device" tells me that the CD-ROM is dka500, "boot dka500" brings us up using Debian CD 1. Schweet. Time to burn #2 and build-n-burn #3.

Note that SRM's reaction to the "boot" command will probably take novices (like me!) by surprise - it essentially does a full reset of the system, then fires up the console trying to boot the device instead of running interactively.

Beyond that, it runs like a stock Debian install... just make a point of getting back to the console after the "Reboot" point and boot the hard drive (dkb100) or the floppy.

Thursday 4/25/2002

Okay, it's time to get off my duff and start trying to get the SMP kernels working again. Honest, it'll happen soon.