From owner-freebsd-alpha Fri Jun 9 18:44:56 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from relay.nuxi.com (nuxi.cs.ucdavis.edu [169.237.7.38]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0A2B937C5C7 for ; Fri, 9 Jun 2000 18:44:52 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from obrien@NUXI.com) Received: from dragon.nuxi.com (root@trang.nuxi.com [209.152.133.57]) by relay.nuxi.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id SAA04709; Fri, 9 Jun 2000 18:44:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from obrien@dragon.nuxi.com) Received: (from obrien@localhost) by dragon.nuxi.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) id SAA62930; Fri, 9 Jun 2000 18:45:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from obrien) Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2000 18:45:17 -0700 From: "David O'Brien" To: Joel Mc Graw Cc: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Alpha wannabe newbie--what hardware? Message-ID: <20000609184517.A62897@dragon.nuxi.com> Reply-To: obrien@freebsd.org References: <3942D275.48165F30@home.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2i In-Reply-To: <3942D275.48165F30@home.com>; from jpmcgraw1@home.com on Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 04:42:45PM -0700 X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT Organization: The NUXI BSD group X-PGP-Fingerprint: B7 4D 3E E9 11 39 5F A3 90 76 5D 69 58 D9 98 7A X-Pgp-Keyid: 34F9F9D5 Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 04:42:45PM -0700, Joel Mc Graw wrote: > On ebay I've seen several machines billing themselves as Alpha 500a > workstations. Is there a difference between these and the Personal > Workstation 500 listed above? They are the same. 500a ==> NT Workstation, 500au ==> Unix workstation. The only difference for running FreeBSD is that you must switch into SRM (load the SRM firmware) before using FreeBSD. The 500au's should have SRM active straight from out of the box. That said, you should run the most current version of SRM, so even with a 500au I would update the firmware. The 500a[u]'s make are very fine FreeBSD machines. Especially for the cost. Mine was $750 with 2MB L3/B-cache and 256MB DIMM RAM. Note: make sure you buy with one L3 cache (DEC calls it "B-cache"). -- -- David (obrien@FreeBSD.org) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message