First Time Alpha install: Prep ?'s

[Brian Conway]

It took quite a while to get everything figured out after the first few
installs on my 233 mhz Multia, but I have a few pointers I could throw out
there.  The install itself is rather simple, and I had no problems doing
ftp installs locally and getting everything up and running on rh 5.2.  The
only bizarre things I have to comment on are kernel configuration:

-I have only gotten 2.0 and 2.2 kernels to compile correctly.  2.3 always
crashes out on something simple, like fork.c, though that might be because
I'm on rh 5.2 and not 6.0 (glibc differences and such).

-Make sure you choose the right scsi device.  It took a few tries to get
the right scsi controller.  I needed the ncr53c8xx with "normal io" 
option, whereas the ncr53c7xx/8xx choice just bombed.

-Make sure you enable frame buffer devices in the console drivers section
and select TGA device.

Those are all hardware specific and will of course depend on your model.
I've found that www.alphalinux.org is a great resource, with occasionally
outdated howto's.  Setting up milo was rather easy and directly out of the
man pages.  Off-topic: I do like the way the loader is built right into
the bios/firmware.  I rarely mess up lilo, but I thought this was quite a
nice change.

That's about all I can think of.  If you run into any specific questions,
I'd be happy to answer any that I can.

Brian Conway
dogbert at clue4all.net


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