> Alphas were discontinued in 2007. Originally produced by DEC, which was > then assimilated by Compaq, then the IP (as in intellectual property, not > internet protocol ;) ) for Alphas was sold to Intel, then production > continued by HP/Compaq a little longer. HP/Compaq will continue to support > them commercially until 2012 supposedly. Until looking it up I thought they > had stopped production earlier than that. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_processor > > Here is the Linux Alpha HOWTO. > http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Alpha-HOWTO.html > > 64bit mass production CPU, a bit ahead of its time, kind of a shame really. > However the knowledge from its development no doubt helped further the > development of the current crop of x86_64 type CPUs (even though Alpha was > RISC). > > I have in storage somewhere a bunch of old CDs and DVDs from a few Linux > events I helped run back when I was in CA, as part of another LUG. I have > some retail box copies of SuSE and RedHat for Alpha (v 5.x or 6.x maybe, as > in about 8 or more years old)... > > I may have missed it in an earlier post, what are your plans for this Alpha > system? General tinkering, server, ... ?
Well, I got the system in 1998. The power supply blew a long time ago and I finally had an extra one to replace it with. Once I figured out how to hot wire the power wire properly and I plugged the CPU back in, the computer came up. I have Redhat 6.2 on it, but that is pretty old. I understand that Redhat 7.2 was probably the last version of Redhat released that supported the Alpha. I guess Debian is the only Linux distribution which runs on Alpha that is still maintained. I have Redhat 5.x AXP sitting on the shelf in a box. I'd like to get a hold of Redhat 7.2 Alpha, but where can I download it from? It is hard in these days of Fedora and Ubuntu to get the old Redhat distributions. I have Windows NT 4.0 Alpha on a small probably 300 meg partition and Linux takes up the rest of the drive. I've shoved a 40 meg drive in there which Linux fdisk has no problem with, but the ARC console partitioner is another story. Actually, I generally don't use that opting to use fdisk under Linux even if I'm setting the computer up for NT. I have no idea what to use the NT side for other than figuring out where MILO is. I have an ISA sound blaster card that works in both Linux and NT, but with no software for NT that is kind of pointless. I have xarchon and lincity. One thing I don't care for with Redhat 6.2 axp, other than poor support for burners, is that Netscape is really old and buggy. As far as what I'll use it for... I've been hoping that I can get a more modern Linux distribution on it that works with DVD burners. Even as a server, I want to be in iptables land and the 2.6 kernel would also be nice. It would be nice if I could install an OHCI USB 2 card and get it to work, but I tried a long time ago and didn't succeed. It used to be that Redhat Linux ran on Sparc, Alpha, and Intel compatible x86 computers. These days, Fedora appears to be a one architecture Linux distribution. In some ways, the Alpha seems to be a worse story than the Tandy Color Computer. Radio Shack's marketing of the color computer wasn't any better than DEC's marketing for the Alpha. Supposedly, floating point calculations on the Alpha are supposed to be really fast. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
