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."

Comments

DECstation != Alpha

[xmedh02]

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.

Re:DECstation != Alpha

[PapaZit]

NetBSD supports MOP and can be used to boot a DECstation (both the older MIPS based ones and the handful of Alpha based ones that use MOP).

Great stuff

[dciman]

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:)

Re:Great stuff

[Jeffrey Baker]

The Multia makes a terrific network appliance. With its 2 PCMCIA slots, PCI slot, network port, and SCSI port, it's absolutely packed with ability. It can be an 802.11b access point, 802.11b bridge, file+print server, NAT router and firewall, DNS cache, HTTP cache, and ssh gateway all at the same time. It's an insane little machine.

Multia buyer's note: don't buy one that isn't working. Finding parity SIMMs is a pain and many samples suffer from thermal problems. Don't buy one unless you've seen it boot.

not all alphas are created equal

[NightHwk1]

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.

But most *can* run Linux

[Styx]

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.

Similar article on NewsForge

[doorbot.com]

Although this one throws in a few SPARC and VAX machines...

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/0 49208

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?

Re:Death of the alpha

[don.g]

Use debian. They have an up-to-date alpha port. Not being driven by commercial considerations, they have ports for many other architectures you can't get redhat for, too (eg m68k). Upgrading from redhat may be a pain, but once you've got it running, debian upgrades are very easy (particularly if you have a fast connection) and there are *lots* of binary packages available.

Re:AlphaPC 164's are good

[JeffL]

I am still running two of these (533mhz 164SX) machines as general login and computing servers. For some reason people really like to use xdm on these old alphas from their Windows boxes. I even setup a nice dual processor Intel machine with loads of memory running Debian and the latest gnome and kde, but nobody seems interested in using that.

The old turbochannel alphas had some pretty serious reliability problems (a 90 day warranty on a $7000 computer!?) I had most of the DEC components (i.e., not 3rd party stuff, like disks) on my two turbochannel alphas replaced several times under maintenaince before getting to board revisions that could last more than 6 months.

However, the PCI based alphas I have seem to be totally bullet proof. I think in the whole time I have been running them, once lost a disk, which one can hardly blame DEC/Compaq for.

For integer stuff the 164SX machines are bit slow, probably comparable to a 350mhz PII, but for floating point, they are probably better than a 700mhz PIII (though I haven't benchmarked these thngs in years, so I may be remembering wrong). Of course they don't compare in any way to a $50 1Ghz Duron.

alphalinux.org dead? try linuxalpha.org

[Styx]

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.