Well, actually, I finally DID get SuSE 7.1 onto my Alpha, although it wasn't easy - there are some quirks in SuSE's installation stuff that causes me heartburn, and it likes to eff with my /etc/fstab file. The problem with that is that I have a really kooky i/o subsystem. I boot off of a Symbios 825 chip driving a 400MB DEC RZ25 disk which is my /boot, long enough to get a kernel running that has the device drivers for the Adaptec 3960D board off of which hang a couple of 9GB Western Digital drives, one of which is / and /usr and swap. Problem is that the CDROM is on the 825, so when it's booted the installation CD, the running kernel has a different notion of what drives are sda, sdb, and sdc than the kernels in /boot. The installation scripts force you to accept changing your /etc/fstab. Ugh.
And, the reason for all that falderol is that I bought an HP combo LSI 875 SCSI/100Mbit Ethernet board for $35 that is now, effectively, a doorstop. It uses PCI bridge chips, and neither the Award BIOS on my Asus P2L97-DS nor the Alpha SRM can cope with it. (The Asus gives me a blank screen, the Alpha simply doesn't see the disks off of it nor the Ethernet chip). Why did I buy this thing? So I could stick it in my Asus and run my 1 year old never-used-at-home Plextor SCSI CDRW drive. It's now on the Alpha on the 50 pin bus off of the 825 chip. Now all I need to do is update the SuSE 7.1 bits so that they can recognize both CDs (the Sony SCSI CDRO and the Plextor SCSI CDRW). Burn, baby, burn.... Cheers, Bayard (who's flying to Florida in 2 weeks anyway!)
