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Recycling Vintage Alphas with Debian
robstah writes: "Vintage Alpha based systems, such as the DECstation are often available going cheap at auctions or free from a skip as companies 'upgrade' to PCs. As many goverments now want to prevent computers from ending up in landfill one solution is for us geeks to recycle. How? Installing Debian of course. Debian Planet has a great article on installing Debian on vintage Alphas."
I think you'll find that vintage alphas are best recycled with gasoline.
FFS, where do you people live? Why aren't there any free Alphas around here? Why, damn you!
The DECstation is not based on the Alpha processor,
but rather on MIPS R2000-R4000. They were not very powerful, say, 386 or 486 level. Alpha was the
next generation after MIPS based DECs.
Someone on here will know this.
I thought the "DEC Station" was a MIPS beast and the Alphas went by another name?
Anyone know? Were there both MIPS- and Alpha-based DEC Stations?
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
is a nearby CS department.
The one at my local university recently got rid of around ten SPARCstation 5s. One is sitting on my desk. (running Solaris, though, as I want to use the SunPC accelerator it has).
You have to be careful, though - the 170Mhz turbosparc in this isn't supported very well under linux - it froze in the middle of X - although OpenBSD worked quite nicely.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I have two old DEC Multia's powered by 166 mhz Alphas. I think it is wonderful to see some attention being given to these fun older platforms. For the longest time I was just messing with old builds of RH on them.... but Debian is the way to go for sure. I've played around with some of the BSD's (I run FreeBSD on my desktop), but didn't ahve much luck. Debain is the next best pick for me.
I highly recommend picking up one of these machines if you want somethign fun to play around with. They can be had for next to nothing on Ebay or Yahoo Auctions. Mine cost me 35 bucks a piece I believe...and they had never been opened form the packing! Integrated sound.....ethernet, PC Card slot.... and the slide out mothboard tray just looks sweet:)
Man, if I cluster a few dozen I might be able to gather up 350Mhz to run a wicked Quake1 server!
------
Today's Top Deals
I've often been intrigued by some of the older Unix workstations, particularly Alphas (for their wide compatibility with PC hardware, of which I have an abudance, and the mystique they carried when they were new). Articles like this insist that people are just throwing these things away, and you can get truckloads of them for nominal cost.
But everything I've seen, on eBay and elsewhere on the net, has been, while maybe inexpensive and even cheap, totally out of proportion to the cost for older PC and even Mac hardware. As the benchmarks in that article show, a 21066 Multia with no cache is barely faster than a 486 at half the clock speed. And yet a loaded multia can still sell for upwards of $200. And the AT-format 21066 board based on the same architecture as the Multia can cost $50 alone (with CPU). I can get a box of 486 or Pentium boards for that much. And of course there is much more abundant binary-packaged software that will run on those.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
.. they'd have of those over here in Finland but im guess im all out of luck. Haven't seen any Alphas for sale except for a small shop that sold off old Alphas and Sparcs for insane prices. "local ebay" doesnt really hold any either though i check there every now and then..
I just wish there was a real computer recycling company/organisation that people would give they're old comps to that would more or less give the stuff away and if intrest for some particular machine hasnt been sparked for say 2 weeks they'd take it to the real recycling center. Of course there isnt really any money in a company working that way which is why there isnt one but it'd be neat.. (another what-to-do if I happen to win a lottery, would be a fun project
Is there room in todays ever growing IT industry for recycled computers? It seems that there are new CPUs being released weekly, each faster then the previous.
New software makes use of the new hardware, often rendering the old hardware useless due to performance requirements.
So how does one find a recycled computer useful? Of course there are numerous computing tasks that require little processing power... but why go for recycled hardware, unless you have no funds for the new and shiny.
As for pure geek factor... well new geek toys have large geek appeal, old toys don't. Its something about that new hardware smell (hmmm... maybe if they sprayed those alphas with that electricity fregrance for geeks...?)
Finally, old hardware chews power. Its expensive to run because of it as it takes more real time (thus power) to perform the same tasks.
I have a 500mhz Alpha at home that used to be a system for running Lightwave at work.
Since both Microsoft and NewTek decided to stop supporting the Alpha architecture, its been sitting in a corner collecting dust.
I attempted to install Linux on this beast about 3 months ago, and realized that it had a BIOS specifically made for WinNT.. a blue menu with no such option as "switch to digital unix" as the article mentions. No way to boot from a floppy or CD either. (though i think it has an option to reinstall NT...)
After spending long hours reading HowTos and articles I finally just gave up.
If you plan on buying a cheap Alpha system for these purposes, do some research first on the model and BIOS type.
Before you can install Debian on an Alpha, you got to first find an Alpha. That's hard to find in Down DownUnder, ie New Zealand (except for my sysadmin, who tends to retire old work machines into his own basement ;-)
I monitored an online auction site (trademe.co.nz) for a while, with no luck. And these old workstations seem to be quite common and quite cheap, say in eBay... I am so jealous.
I want a VMS system! That's what I'd like to get MY hands on an Alpha system for. Either that or I'll have to wait for freeVMS to get off the ground...hooah!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Even then, Slash traffic was heavy. Mod:perl groaned on this host! It was a testament to the DEC folks that it ran with more than a couple hundred connections at all! After all, the Multia was a severely compromised Alpha design, which mated the CPU to a PC-style I/O bus.
Bandwidth consumption forced the removal of Slashdot to real hosting. Was this in '98? Anyhow, shortly thereafter VA donations (pre Andover) moved Slashdot onto dual PII's, and the mighty growth of Slashcode ensued! That's about the time my own Multia started to overheat and require BLOWING INTO THE CASE before rebooting. I put Debian Ham on a K5, and moved my RISC fetish onto early UltraSparc and SGI R10000.
Who else originally found this place because they were looking for WindowMaker .10 -era related sites, and watched Rob's link collection grow?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm continuously amazed at just how cheap hardware has gotten and how sweet various distros of *nix run on yesteryear's boxes. Last month I grabbed ten loaded Pentium 233 MMX boxes off Ebay for $890 (with shipping) and am pressing them into service as workstations.
Running a beowulf cluster of these! It'd be almost as fast as my intel box! :)
> and i'm not a karma whore or troll!
> a normal person getting FP --- unprecedented
Sorry man, but you *are* a troll. It kinda goes with the whole first post
thing.
(even more) OT: Is slashdot broken for anyone else? I consistently get
dumped to the first page when trying to click on damn near every internal
Slashdot link. It comes and goes, but sometimes I can't change my viewing
threshhold, can't reply to comments, can't even view some articles - in
particular the ones on the sidebar. Just get dumped to the front page.
Fucking annoying.
Get a bad ass voodo card and run GLquake on it.
They opensourced it right?.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
No, but most Alphas can be flashed with new firmware, and enable you to use SRM (the Unix console) that way.
It's hard to say, without knowing exactly what Alpha you have (real DEC or or a whitebox, PC164LX/SX), how you could install Linux on it, but either an SRM firmware upgrade or install using MILO.
Best of luck with it, it can be quite fun.
/Styx
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these running debian! ;p
I consistently get dumped to the first page when trying to click on damn near every internal Slashdot link.
U R NOT ALONE
Im all for debian and making good use of old pc's :)
I have made a couple of both literate non pc literate people smile by installing debian into their old abandoned boxes and setting them up as 56k gateway and as small fileserver for their home or small buisiness network.
I hope debian runs on alpha as well as it does on i386 :)
I know everyone's sick of hearing that the BSDs out-do Linux, but on non-intel hardware the situation is really quite exaggerated.
;-).
The Linux benefits of commercial software (Corel, Real, Sun) don't apply to non-x86 architectures, and the huge flock of Linux developers are working on the i386 development... The other platforms are a hacky afterthought. Meanwhile, the BSDs are no different from i386, to VAX, to Alpha, to Sparc, to MVE.
So does anyone have one good reason to run Linux on non-i386 hardware (not that the reasons to run it on x86 hardware are good)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
ROFLMAO!
I have a DEC 3000/400 (no "station") that I got virtually for free a couple years back. I ran netbsd (which has much better hardware support on turbochannel machines than alpha linux, plus it's not linux ::ducks::) on it for a long time, it was a web, name, ftp server, you get the picture. 150 or more days uptime, only interrupted by power outages, and it ran in a closet so must have been at least 80 degrees F in there continuously. When I went to move it, I was puzzled at the sticky grey goo underneath the machine until I realized it had melted its plastic feet!
It's a great machine, incredibly reliable, unfortunately the days of these beasts being useful are past I think. It's just so cheap to get an x86 (or in my case an iBook with a dead screen) machine to replace them which is faster, cooler, more energy efficient, and quieter.
Of course the coolness factor of running this old workhorse still appeals to me, perhaps when I get a house with a basement (alleviating the noise and heat) I'll set it up once more.
As others have pointed out the 2.4 kernel series has been painful on alpha. This is symptomatic of the fact that the alpha/linux community has died, completely. The two big alpha sites, Alphalinux (referenced in the article), and Alpha News have disappeared. I've been checking almost daily for months. In the last few months I've had a very hard time finding packages. I installed redhat 4 years ago, after a painful wrestling with the pre-release debian of the day. Now redhat 7.2 for alpha is still not out yet, despite the fact that it's been out for i386 since the beginning of October. Redhat sees the writing on the wall too. Their rawhide likewise hasn't seen a new package in a good while. Now I wish I had tried harder with Debian.
I've always hand-installed a lot of packages, but lately, since I can't find binary updates to redhat at all, I've been compiling more and more by hand. And lots of them don't compile. 64-bit cleanness is not something most programmers do by default. (hint: do not use long unless you really know what you're doing!)
It is ironic that in this day where everyone is anticipating the next great 64-bit chip (x86-64/Itanic), I am contemplating moving back to the 32-bit world, after using 64 bits for 4 years, because maintaining it is becoming a chore. DEC/Compaq/HP has really shot themselves in the foot. Between all their mergers and questionable "roadmap", they've alienated their fans, supporters, customers, employees, and even the Hewlett family. Their engineers left for AMD (and you wondered why the K7 was so much faster than the K6 -- buy Athlons!) their compiler guys and patents left for Intel (boycott Intel!), and there's little left of the original vision.
So all you tinkerers out there, I encourage you to buy up all the surplus Miata's you can find! And help the plight of Linux/Alpha and 64-bit clean code across the OSS landscape! Because 64-bit processors are going to become more prevalent, not less, and the world needs people on 64-bit machines to test stuff! (only about 5% of the packages I run into don't compile and run out of the box on alpha/linux -- but those 5% need to be fixed!) And everyone buy a USB PCI card for it too, because the current USB drivers suck! They can hang my kernel.
Oh, and an alpha makes a great firewall/router since all the script-kiddie buffer overflow hacks don't work. (all the script kiddies use buffer overflow attacks that insert x86 code onto the stack...this obviously doesn't work on alpha) A little bit of security through obscurity can help. But don't neglect real security!
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I've got a 533mhz 164SX that i got on ebay 2-3 years ago here ($250 for the board with cpu at the time). It works great and is a decent speed. (the noname 21064 that it replaced was painfully slow)
Another benefit of using anything other than x86 CPUs is that they are much less likely to be broken into as script kiddie exploits are more common for the lousy popular architecture. Now that there are decent open source web browsers available you can even use it as a desktop machine.
Warning-plug ahead
I am the adminof ACCRC and I thought a plug for the nonprofit I work at is appropriate here.
ACCRC refurbishes computers and donates them to worthy causes. All donated machines go out the door w/ Suse preinstalled and the retail box taped to the side.
Our charter allows us to accept any Technology as a donation. That which can not be placed w/ a worthy cause is used for cool projects in house.
(ie permanent magnet motors in huge old tape drives are being played with for windmill generator possibilities)
If you want to donate, volunteer, or just say "Hi", check out http://www.accrc.org/
END plug
ok
This place rocks I have alot of fun and get to save the world at the same time. 'nuff said
Cheers,
-chris
admin
slashdot reader
he who fears the 'effect'
Alpha is well supported on many Linux distributions as well as free BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD). What I'd like to see would be a bettern support for various SGI boxes, starting with Indy :-)
Year Machine CPU CLOCK RAM UNIXBench Score
1992? PC 80486 66MHz 32MB 11.1
1995 Multia Alpha 21066A 166MHz 64MB 12.8
I upgrade my p75 to a netgear router, and my Ping went from 30ms to 10ms. I even tried that freesco floppy router, same thing.
People say that they make good routers, but I want the lowest ping for games. So maybe older machines might good firewalls, if you dont care about ping. Some good benchmarks on firewall/nat latency would be nice. Hell, I still got a sparc 20 that makes a good X terminal, but ill use machines built for low latency firewalls.
-
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. - Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809)
You should be able to make a boot floppy, stick MILO on said disk with the correct processor type, and set your ARC menu to accept floppies (if for some reason it doesn't already). Haven't you looked at your setup menu? I'm using an ARC-based (read: previous NT-betrothed) Alpha here with Debian Linux just fine.
I use an old AlphaStation 200/233 as my main machine at home -- and have done so for years. This machine is great from a stability standpoint.
/usr, /home, and /.
I work in a shop where we always have UNIX boxes mirrored, and backed up to tape on a twice daily basis, bays of UPSs, diesel generators ouside, etc... This kind of work environment really rubs off on you. Thus for me, having a _reliable_ machine is an order of magnitude more important than having a fast one. The box runs FreeBSD (never had to do a re-install for an upgrade, unlike Windows or Redhat users...). I always do nightly backups to a DDS-3 tape drive using amanda (12 tapes in the rotation), and will soon have 2 9.1 Gig SCSI drives configured as a mirror for
True, buying 72 Pin true parity RAM sucks, but I can use IDE drives for cheap mass storage (with the help of a promise ide controller) and many modern PCI video cards will work in it. I've even had USB devices connected to it, after adding a USB card. In short, the device support isn't bad at all.
Oh yeah.. The software support is "allright". BSD and Linux run on it, but sometimes when you're compiling programs, you find some twit wrote the code for x86 only. Also, I hate being stuck with netsape 4.7 (using the netsape from OSF1 in emulation), but I'm compiling qt and konq as I type this. I thought I'd give it a chance. (mozilla never will compile)
To sum it up, the device support isn't bad, if you do your research. If you get a good video card, use a light weight window manager (WindowMaker for me), and a large monitor, you'll feel right at home.
Good Luck!
Although this one throws in a few SPARC and VAX machines...
0 49208
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/
And it seems the MIPS-based versions of the respective OSes are coming along; NetBSD will run on your O2. SGI's work on Linux for MIPS is as far as "only Indys have a working XFree86" although a few other machines will boot Linux.
An interesting question is what about the Cobalt MIPS-based appliances? Don't they run Linux as the x86 ones do? So where's the source code for those?
I've been a fan of the Alpha chip since its debut in the February, 1993 Communications of the ACM back in 1990. Alpha was the great hope, a new chip designed from the ground up as a scientific and technical powerhouse. I had read Darryll Strauss's great article about harnessing 166 433 MHz Alphas toward the production of Titanic, and that only whet my appetite further. When I read that Samsung was going to be pushing Alpha workstations, I exercised my most persuasive writing skills and requested a machine for development, with the idea that it might be used to further the use of Alphas in visual effects work.
:)
Shockingly, about three months later, a battered old SmartAlpha Station A10 showed up on my doorstep. I suppose you can tell a workstation from a desktop machine by the gauge of sheet metal, this thing weighs about 50 lbs. At the time I was still under the influence of NT, so I ported all of our code over to NT on the Alpha. It wasn't that hard, but it wasn't that rewarding either. The rest of our shop is SGI machines, and, well, NT isn't Unix.
Then I decided to run Linux on the box. I ordered Red Hat 5.2 from CheapBytes. 5.2 was the latest Red Hat release for Alpha at the time, although they were shipping 6.0 for X86 machines.
We ported all of our SGI software to the Alpha, and used it for a couple of movies, most noteably Woman on Top . We did some ray tracing using Larry Gritz's BMRT for some of the scenes in the movie, where the power of the Alpha was well used.
After that, I took the machine home, and used it as my home computer until I got a laptop -- and it's been off since then. As promised by the title, here are the lessons learned.
Pro:
Alphas are significantly more finicky about floating point exceptions than the other machines we were using at the time. We found a lot of bugs in our code due to the fact that applications would crash on the Alpha rather than just silently generating bad results.
There are many benefits to using multiple architectures when developing code. It keeps you much more honest. It forces you to keep your build trees in good shape.
Alpha is a 64-bit machine, and it was my first exposure to the fact that long != int. We'll all find this out eventually, sooner is better than later.
Cons:
Alphas are outcasts. That was true three years ago when we got the machine, and it has become dramatically more true now. Finding a decent web browser, for instance, was a challenge. In general, the avalanche of tools that makes Linux so pleasant and productive dries up to a trickle when you look for Alpha tools.
It's very common that programs that you download source for don't quite compile under Alpha. It's not really the fault of those programmers, of course -- they don't have Alpha machines, typically, to test the installation on.
Alphas are just expensive boxes. They will never compete on a MIPS/$ basis. This was true even when they were many times as fast as the Intel chips, and it's becoming more and more true.
Finally, persuing oddball architectures is just typically not a cost-productive way to spend one's time. Of course, I say that -- and I'd sooner die than ever use a Microsoft product
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Well, I'll let just let the natural forces over at eBay figure that out then! You see I am going to be selling my own Alphastation 166 - or is that AlphaStation? - on that there eBay site there.
SKITZOWhat is the deal with eBay? . . . Do they need to take a percentage of *every* transaction? . . . What if it's undervalued? . . . Who has the time?! . . . And then there's PayPal! . . . Hey Pal, keep your laws off my fucking cash! . . . Leggo my money, as it were! . . . Eggos, legos, I'm selling it all - but my ego is staying! . . . Here we go again! . . . What is the deal with selling your ego?!
</SKITZO>
I have two alpha machines. I'm going to be giving one of them away next week. They both run NetBSD, because that is the best free OS in my opinion. I tried everything else, but.. NetBSD seems to have a solid number of developers and activity and it always seems to do what I need it to. Frankly, I don't like the Alpha very much and it has been a pain in the ass. Save your money, spend it on something else. My Sun machines are much less of a headache. I want to be positive about the fact that Debian is still putting work into it, but if you don't own one don't waste your money. Really. You can more wisely apply your cash in some other way.
I got mine originally to play with OpenVMS hobbyist. If you want to run VMS there is a software product for intel boxes that emulates a DECstation. Use it instead.
I then moved to Tru64 hobbyist, it was OK as an OS, but it is selective about the hardware it works on. You must have supported _graphics_ hardware. There is no compelling reason to run it.
Then I eventually stumped onto NetBSD as a last option. It is stable and it lets me actually use the box, but... I wasted money on the box in my opinion.
you could run NetBSD and be better off.
by the way AlphaStations are Alphas not DecStations
I suppose most people don't know but FreeBSD on the Alpha works just fine. Have you tried looking into this?
Back in 1996 I almost bought an Alpha because it sh/could run NT... I am now very glad I did not.
The mirror at http://www.linuxalpha.org seems to be online.
And, RedHat, hasn't given on the Alpha yet, RedHat 7.2 *will* be comming out. They've done a deal with Compaq: see Phillip Copeland (Bryce)'s diary
But, you're right, more Alpha hackers are always welcome.
/Styx
Yes! You too can take a system that was once valued at more than $10,000 and place Debian Linux on it and make it into those dsl/cable routers you see in retail stores go for around $100!! Or even into a Linksys Gigadrive that goes for $700!!
It is a pitty to see such fine hardware depreciate in value faster than a Ford Pinto.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
Hmm, I should have known this would be the response I'd get to posting :)
anonymously in reply to a first post
Personally, I wouldn't blame it on Linux. I'd blame it on Perl, slashcode,
and the general incompetence of the editors/coders. But that's just me.
BSD people tend to be assholes.
This is a DECstation after recieving a nice beating and causing the cops to be called on me and a friend. Hopefully having this in comments won't get it slashdoted -- it's no longer on a university network...
Reading this atricle brought back memories of running NT on some Alpha servers. The Alpha was awesome hardware and its very sad that it fell victim to the Wintel meatgrinder. The technology was superior to the Intel chips, sadly DEC could never match the marketing muscle of Intel. Did Intel lean on Microsoft to drop the NT version for the Alpha?
Still for those who have access to an Alpha you have my best wishes. Its great kit.
As far as Free Unices on SGI, the Indy is currently the best supported. It is the only SGI MIPS machine currently capable of running XFree under Linux. NetBSD has a bit more success then Linux, but there it also seems that the Indy is among the best supported. If you have An O2, NetBSD might be your only choice. OpenBSD doesn't yet have anything to show, but it will probably have similar support to NetBSD when it finally appears.
As for Gnu/Linux, Debian is usually the best bet with diverse, uncommon hardware, including the SGI Indy. You can also find information off of SGI's Open Source and Linux site, and even Red Hat flavored stuff here and there.
The "News" seemed to be that Debian supports obscure and older hardware - the afterthought "with Debian" was relevant for you. While this specific example was old AXPs that can be had for minimal cost, you could have inferred that Debian might also have support for MIPS... which it does. While Debian/BSD still hasn't come into its own yet, you might find that NetBSD can be more stable than Linux in the meantime. But your Indy has choices beyond 5.3+XFS and 6.(0,2,3,5). Have you looked into Windows NT 4.0?
cheers
-castlan
Is it really so hard to have a few people look over an article before it gets posted to the main page to verify the person who wrote it isn't a total moron? This is like the third time in 3 days I've seen a moron make the main page. First OS X is a NetBSD derivative. Next some FUD spreader proclaims "Sparc is dead." And now we have the Alpha-powered DECstation. Give me a break.
On a matter actually pertaining to the article, I have FreeBSD running on my Multia (the frambuffer isn't supported, but then again I'm using it as a headless print server so it's not like it matters) Believe it or not the thing has been relatively stable, sporting an uptime of 150 days so far (which, for those of you who know, is relatively good for a Multia)
At least I hope so. Debian supports some eclectic hardware but it sure doesn't neccesarilly come with boot disks that will actually work with your machine.
There is this wonderful thing that people say when their package doesn't compile on another platform...
"But it works on my Pentium!"
So many apps out there are not 64 bit clean, and they will need to be in the not so far future. A hell of a lot of the Debian package people have been doing a brilliant job to make the packages available compile and work on 64 bit platforms. Bdale Garbee is probably the most well known identity working on this effort and has put a lot of effort into porting to Debian to new architectures.
Not all packages are destined to get ported to every architectures (eg: there is no sound device on an S/390, so no real need to have certain sound packages: But don't forget things like network sound architectures!), but most are, and a lot of it is developers who have no understanding of the issues caused by a 64 bit environment.
"But who cares about Alpha?"
If you think Alpha is the only platform that will benefit from 64 bit clean code, think again! There are a fair number of 64 bit platforms, like ia64 and PA-Risc. Fixing such problems will make such software work on all 64 bit platforms.
One last thing to note is that sometimes it's good to have a different perspective on things occasionly. Not everything revolves around the ia32 (i386, etc) platform like everyone generally seems to think.
Not that we have any Alphas to give away, but you can try out Debian running on a couple of Alphas in the Compaq Test Drive Program. We also have Red Hat, SuSE, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64 Unix (formerly Digital Unix), and OpenVMS running on Alphas in the program, and though we cannot provide official support, we are always happy to respond to user questions and requests. Learn more about the Test Drive Program, see what we have running now, or sign up for an account.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0
:)
Off-topic? Yes. Do I care? Not really.
Um...shouldn't that be 2=0?
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I think what everyone wants to know is...
:)
Were you the one that got to edit the scenes with Penelope Cruz in the nude?
Seriously, I saw the movie while I was dating a Brazilian (her idea, not mine), and I don't remember any scenes in particular that would have required ray tracing. Can you specify the scenes?
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
I eventually went to NetBSD 1.5 and it booted up and worked fine. It's still alive.
I thought it would be fun, but was a bit dissapointed to discover that it was on the order of a tenth the speed of my Cyrix PR233 machine. I thought an Alpha at 150 could at least keep up with a ~180 MHz X86 processor, but NOOOOOOOO.
Oh, well. It still makes a good Postgresql server.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
So a Multia would make a very good Quake or QII server. The server doesn't need to do 3D graphics, it just needs to track the positions of all the players, rockets, etc. This is FPU-heavy, but the Alpha's FPU was always better than the Pentiums of the time. Although the integer processing wasn't much faster, an Alpha could smoke any Pentium at, e.g., rendering.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I completely agree.
While developing software for a large research project, I did most of the coding on my homebrew Pentium and Alpha ev4 systems. In my experience there were little problems in porting the c++ software between the different architectures, other than some minor problems anyone will experience with different versions of GCC and EGS.
In some cases, this porting back and forward even benefitted in tracing and debuggin some of the obscure data structures I had used.
Therefore, I believe porting in general and specifically wrt. different hardware benefits design en code quality.
Go Alpha GO!
Isn't G3/G4 64-bit too?
My primary machine right now is a 533sx, still an alpha. I run redhat on it because frankly, debian imho still sucks on alpha.
You guys are forgetting that debian isn't the only thing to run on these boxes. Slackware has an alpha port, redhat works, suse does as well.
Freebsd runs very nicely on these machines - in fact, the only reason I'm not running it now is because my video card is flakey under it, but I have an alphastation as a firewall running it.
Compaq even has betas of their fortran, c, and c++ compiler to make things that much smoother.
Has anyone done a definitive comparison or the various 'vintage' unix-flavor architectures to give people an assessment of the pros and cons of each? I am a big 'lunchbox' SPARC fan (the IPC, IPX, Classic and LX) and find them to be great little boxes for light duty tasks like DNS, DHCP, and running the backup drives. (I prefer OpenBSD for these boxen.)
However, the proprietary expansion slot format (SBUS) means that extra NICs, video cards, etc are priced at a premium to ISA or PCI equivalents. I know the Alpha Multia took PCI cards, but had heat problems (like the lunchbox sparcs).
It would be nice to have a head on head comparison of all of this 'formerly elite' hardware so people could make informed decisions.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I'm one of those pre-uid geezers who found this place after checking Rob's page for AfterStep (not WindowMaker!) "wharf" apps.
Funny -- I bought a Multia about the same time, and spent many hours fiddling around with it. (Because it was cool -- and face it -- slow.)
I've seen a few comments asking where to find old equipment and one comment made a great suggestion--the local university. Those of you who are living in the Washington DC metropolitan area should be happy to know that the University of Maryland, College Park hocks their stuff to the public. Their operation is called Terp Traders. I just checked and they had a few DECs available ($50 or less). Goto Inventory-->Data processing-->CPU. Sorry, I know some of you are terps yourselves and wanted to keep this a secret all to yourselves, but I'm a karma whore. Enjoy! And, go Terps Basketball!
Linux at home
moreover the current status of the Alpha port is doing quite well thank you and is the best supported port out there bar none. Please disregard this gentlemans comments regarding the fesibility of 2.4 on Alpha. Only a 'few' engineers have left Compaq to pursue other projects like the Athlon, HP is porting their own UNIX to Alpha, and the Compaq compiler team is alive and well working at Compaq in Nashua, NH on spitbrook rd. working on Alphas 'and' the Itanium compiler. Oh, Intel hasn't bought out Alpha, they only bought a 'license' to some of the EV8 core, thats it. I hope I've cleared up enough fud.
As for the situation regarding the orignal domain and hardware please see the following: list thread.
We don't intend to fade into the night. Not while I'm still around anyways :-). Oh I run debian unstable (which is anything but unstable) on my 600Mhz 164LX.
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
it would have been nice to have at least a half kludge system. instead its back to kludge/kludge with wintel
Try www.linuxalpha.org
On a related note, all this talk about Alphas (Alpha AXP for you old-timers) makes me sentimental for my Alpha AXP PC 150 (Jensen) gathering dust in my basement.
I have been thinking about powering it up and trying something on it, but the choices seem limited. Since the Jensen is a bizzare EISA machine, even distros that support later alpha architectures (PCI), don't support the Jensen. So far I have downloaded NetBSD, since it seems to be the only BSD that supports Jensen.
Other suggestions about what to run are welcome. I have also been looking at getting a Tru64 hobby license, but I don't know how far back I have to get to get a version that supports it.
The bigger questions is what do I do with the box once I get it running? I already have a Netgear firewall, and don't need a print server. The graphics card is unsupported, so X workstation is not possible, either.
What should I do with this heat generating paperweight?
I have an old Multia, that I've been trying to resurrect with RH7.1, but everytime I do an install I get file system corruption (ext2) when I start doing anything serious.
I've tried swapping the memory with another machine (my SGI Indy) to no avail. I am wondering if perhaps the SCSI hard drive is dying, or if the machine is just dead.
I'd use Debian if this problem were a RHism, but I'm not going to pull down yet another ISO and waste an evening installing it if not.
Anybody else seen this sort of symptom?
www.eFax.com are spammers
No.
Lately, I've been considering the idea of a cluster of old machines (stone-soup computer etc.)
My primary concern is energy consumption (due to ecologic and economic reasons).
Could anyone please comment on ideas to save energy with old already built computers?
No Transmeta suggestions, please - not available.
Is it possible to feed 2 computers with just one powersource?
In other words, what could be turned off?
Another thing... I saw a cool add-on processor card you put into a PCI slot and bingo, machine upgraded (kinda).
What if we had a Beowulf of PCI-slots? (Sorry, hehe)
Last, but not... why is Slashdot sooooo damn slow? All pages render up to 99% or 100% and then fail to finish loading. No other site does this.
Thx a lot for any comment.
Does anyone know if Debian runs on a Ruffian (UX2)
Alpha box ? I'm currently running RH7.0 and cannot
upgrade to RH7.1 since they dropped Ruffian support (the boot images don't work -- something
to do with the kernel start address being changed
is what I heard).
I tried Debian 2.2rev2 several months back but the
install failed.
It was cheap to buy, that is true.
But now I need one of those little 2.5 inch SCSI internal drives. The original blew up after the power went out and I tried to reboot - after 235 days straight running RH as a print server!
Unfortunatly the old Apple Powerbooks all use that same HD so the prices were still too high the last time I checked.
Seriously, all I need is a 500MB drive that will work for a decent price.
No, I don't want to kit it out with the mounting bracket for the 3.5 inch units - I don't want to lose my slot.
So anyone know of a good place to find parts? A floppy cover would be killer to have also.
Yes, having an Alpha is really cool.
It won't keep up with your cyrix on integer ops, but stick a heavy floating point app on that box and you'll get entirely different results.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The company I work for was running NetBSD on an old DEC Alpha three or four years ago. We finally abandoned it because FreeBSD installed on a Pentium 233 MMX was faster.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
The Decstation could be MIPS or ALPHA.
I have a decstation with a alpha KN15-BA with 64mb ram runnin netbsd 1.5.1.
Runs like a dream!
Actually, *BSD is dead.
Ah, yes, me, too!
/. is slow, but I was getting yesterday (and today earlier, I think) dumped to the main page.
/. was /.-ed.
I complained above that
I guess
AlphaStations are not particularly vintage Alphas, they still use modern PCI/EISA/ISA architecture. The vintage Alphas are the AXP systems, like the DEC3000/800AXP, which are NOT supported by linux, and are unlikely ever to be supported unless somebody cleans up the linux bus code.
the DEC3000 family are Turbochannel based Alphas, and consequentially are fairly different to their PCI/EISA based brethren.
NetBSD supports these models nicely (just not completely last time I looked).
Then onto the matters of the DECStation Family.
The DECStation family are a mix of VAX and MIPS based systems. Neither of which are supported properly by Linux. (Linux/MIPS is still fairly imature). However, once again, NetBSD supports the MIPS models (the relevant port is 'pmax'), and some of the VAX models as well. Furthermore, the pmax port of NetBSD is remarkibly stable, and I was using a DECStation 5000/240 back in 1998 as a web server for the computer science students association at the university I was studying at at the time.
There is lots of information available about the pmax family of systems at the NetBSD ports information page.