Dear mailing list, I am a complete newcomer to Debian Alpha, and Linux/Alpha in general. I recently bought an Aspen Systems Durango II workstation with the following specifications:
600MHz Alpha processor PC164 LX motherboard 512MB RAM 9GB SCSI HDD 10/100 Ethernet NIC CD-ROM drive It has some sort of Linux on-board but given very good experiences with Debian, I would like to put Debian on this machine. >From what I gather from mailing lists, there are two issues (the below looks very much like a HOWTO itself, I have marked my questions with Q): * Booting. Apparently this must be done through a floppy. There is a HOWTO on installing Red Hat from floppies at Aspen's website: http://www.aspsys.com/docs/linuxinstall.txt Q According to the HOWTO, I should put MILO and linload.exe on a floppy. Are MILO (I believe I need the "lx164 exmp" edition) and linload.exe available on the Debian install CD? Then I enter the BIOS utility screen through F2, and set up linload.exe on the floppy as my "bootfile" and the milo on the CD-ROM as my "ospath". Then I run ARCINST to set up my boot partition. I apparently get ARCINST from Q the Windows NT CD-ROM; is this available from the Debian CD too? (I can probably dig out my Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM, but I would much prefer going through Debian) Then I boot MILO off the floppy which should bring me to a MILO prompt. I then say: boot scd0:/kernels/generic.gz root=/dev/scd0 (if it's a SCSI CD-ROM drive) boot hdd:/kernels/generic.gz root=/dev/hdd (if it's an IDE CD-ROM drive) Q Is the path to the kernel different for Debian? Will it boot properly if I do this? So then Debian boots and I do the install thing. After that there is some generic BIOS stuff I won't bug you with since it's no issue. * Headless running. There is a previous article about doing just this on the debian-alpha list: http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/thread.php3?subject=Headless+install+on+LX164&list=241 This hints that there might be a simpler way - it darkly hints at the existence of "debian install floppies." Q Does headless require a SRM or ARC BIOS, or are both OK? Since my Alpha will have a LX164 (which is a half-flash evaluation board capable of holding only one BIOS at a time) I must flash my BIOS to switch, not that that's a huge deal. As far as serial terminals go, I can probably hook up some sort of serial link between my trusty IBM WorkPad z50 and the Alpha. Finally, one more question: * I eventually want the machine to boot smoothly to the point where it has its Q own IP address and I can telnet (or ssh) in. Do all NICs work in headless mode that work in headed mode? Thank you for reading this (long!) letter. I hope to contribute my knowledge to the Debian/Alpha community in the form of a HOWTO. Sincerely, Sean Callanan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
