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

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.

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.

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.