Which Unix for Dec Alpha?
al...@my-deja.com
I don't mean to start religious wars, but I am wondering if one of the
many Unix-es available these days, is there one (or several) preferred
for the Alpha? I heard some negative rumors about Linux support for the
Alpha (or at least negative comments about certain distributions), so I
started looking around at others: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and there
could be other good ones in this maze. How do you pick between them?
Or are they all pretty much as good as the others? I suspect that the
availability of software is best for Linux (I noticed that DB2 is
available for Unix, and perhaps Oracle as well, but probably only on the
i386 platform). On the other hand, I assume that most of the commercial
software is for i386 and not for the Alpha, and gnu and open source
software would hopefully only take a rebuild (like Apache, which I
noticed was available in binary form for the Linux version of Alpha, but
only i386 for the others, at least in the latest release). Anyway, if
anyone can offer me recommendations on these or other Unix choices for
the Alpha from whatever ventage point (like tools, applications,
performance, installation/administration, etc.), I'd be grateful.
Also, I know that this is not specifically a Dec Alpha question, but
somewhat related to the above: is there a preferred Unix implementation
for multi processing machines (namely, I have a Dual Pentium Pro on
which I may eventually want to run Unix)?
Any help or pointers would be much appreciated.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Zane H. Healy
> I am trying to install some flavor of Unix on my Dec Alpha (Multia), and
> I don't mean to start religious wars, but I am wondering if one of the
> many Unix-es available these days, is there one (or several) preferred
> for the Alpha? I heard some negative rumors about Linux support for the
> Alpha (or at least negative comments about certain distributions), so I
> started looking around at others: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and there
> could be other good ones in this maze. How do you pick between them?
Well, I'm a _long_ time Linux user, and have used it since 0.12, but with
the pair of Alpha's I've gone with OpenBSD, as I found it to be a better fit
with the hardware. It was a nightmare to get Linux on a AlphaStation 200,
yet OpenBSD on the AS200, and on a Multia was painless. I'd recommend that
you look at either NetBSD or OpenBSD, the Alpha support in FreeBSD is fairly
new, and I don't know how good it is.
http://www.netbsd.org
http://www.openbsd.org
I just FTP'd the OpenBSD distro to my Linux box, built a boot floppy, and
installed via FTP. Piece of cake! (Note, I don't have X-Windows on either
of these systems, don't know how well that works).
Zane
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Scott Wood
<hea...@shell1.aracnet.com> wrote:
>Well, I'm a _long_ time Linux user, and have used it since 0.12, but
>with the pair of Alpha's I've gone with OpenBSD, as I found it to be a
>better fit with the hardware. It was a nightmare to get Linux on a
>AlphaStation 200, yet OpenBSD on the AS200, and on a Multia was
>painless. I'd recommend that you look at either NetBSD or OpenBSD,
>the Alpha support in FreeBSD is fairly new, and I don't know how good
>it is.
Linux support for alpha is actually quite good; installation of Debian
was painless on both Multia and SX164, and hardware support is fairly
complete. However, unless the OpenBSD/alpha web site is horribly out
of date, OpenBSD/alpha doesn't support ISA DMA (no floppy or sound,
unless you have a PCI sound card) or shared libraries. OpenBSD also
requires the SRM console, while Linux can boot from either SRM or
ARC/AlphaBIOS, which is nice for machines that have no SRM.
Of course, if you don't need floppy or sound, and have ample memory and
disk space, OpenBSD is a perfectly viable choice.
-Scott
Thor Lancelot Simon
Of course, none of these restrictions (save booting only from SRM, which
is hardly a restriction considering that there are almost no machines
for which you can't get the SRM for free any more) apply to NetBSD/alpha;
the machine-dependent code in OpenBSD/alpha was taken from a very, very
old version of NetBSD and, oddly enough, progress does march on...
--
Thor Lancelot Simon t...@rek.tjls.com
"And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?"
David O'Brien
>>I'd recommend that you look at either NetBSD or OpenBSD, the Alpha
>>support in FreeBSD is fairly new, and I don't know how good it is.
The FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT support for Alpha is *very* good. We now have an
OSF/1 emulator that can run the Digital Unix version of Netscape,
Mathmatica, and ATOM created binaries. In addition you can by commercial
Motif for it at www.apps2go.com. And there are 2000 pre-compiled
packages for FreeBSD/Alpha.
--
-- David (obr...@NUXI.com)
Christoph Franzen
David,
do you know wether the Jensen (DECpc 150 AXP / DEC 2000/300) is
supported?
Regards, Christoph
Yong S. Yi
> I am trying to install some flavor of Unix on my Dec Alpha (Multia), and
> I don't mean to start religious wars, but I am wondering if one of the
> many Unix-es available these days, is there one (or several) preferred
> for the Alpha? I heard some negative rumors about Linux support for the
> Alpha (or at least negative comments about certain distributions), so I
> started looking around at others: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and there
> could be other good ones in this maze. How do you pick between them?
Just for you...
http://async.org/~ysyi/multia.html
-y.
--
Yong S. Yi KeyID 1024/0AF3C425 http://async.org/~ysyi/
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