On Sunday 22 June 2003 03:55 pm, bob smith wrote: > I am looking for some advise or hints if you guys are willing > to advise. I have not been able to piece together all the bits > I need to determine what version and pieces I should run to > do: > > 1) Desktop box that will allow me to do surfing, docs that are > compatible with word (rtf is fine), some gimp stuff, some > audio ripping and conversion. I have a couple of 250/4 266 > boxes I want to do this with. I keep looking at KDE and gnome > for this.
No problem here--RTF is universally compatible, and even command-line tools like docbook-utils can create RTF files. Gimp runs OK on Alpha (as much as I've run it), and so does KDE. Don't know about gnome and audio ripping/encoding. > 2) web server wtih php/mysql, webmail. I have a 164LX box I > want to use to do this. but I could use a 3000 box I have - > that would be my choice, cause I want to... Again, not too much problem. Apache and MySQL both run just fine on Alpha. PHP 4.3.2 runs fine too; earlier versions also do fine if you just build them without the pear components. I don't know too much about webmail, but I suspect SquirrelMail is also pretty platform-agnostic. > 3) put together a beowulf or beowulf-like cluster using 5 > 164LX boxes and 2 DS10 boxes. Beowulf might be the thing to use here. From what I've heard, OpenMOSIX isn't quite alpha-ready yet. I could be wrong about that tho. > 4) Server for compiling and kernel building, app building, I > havea 164lx/600 with a gig and lots of disk for this. Ditto here--164LX/600MHz with...well, 512MB. But 512MB is generally enough if all you're doing is compile jobs on a uniprocessor box. > I have most of my machines running netbsd now, but I am not > able to get KDE to really build right even on some of the vga > cards that are supposed to be supported. Recent XFree86+Radeon 7500 PCI works pretty well on Linux-Alpha. You even get some decent 3D acceleration. > I would like to have all the boxes or most of the boxes running > the same os, and am willing to convert to linux if I can get > the right one that supports Alpha. Debian has been solid for a > good while on one of my boxes. I just got a new to me machine, > dual cpu 1000 running redhat. The gnome and kde stuff run fine > on this box. Between Debian and RedHat, I personally would choose Debian. Debian is pretty committed to keeping their Alpha branch pretty well in sync with their x86 branch, unlike RedHat and SuSE. RedHat/SuSE are pretty much just turning the Linux-Alpha project over to those employees who want to work on it in their free time, and saying "here, go nuts if you want." -- Kelledin "If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does it still cost four figures to fix?"
