Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2000 11:24:41 +0200 From: Wilko Bulte <wkb@chello.nl> To: "David O'Brien" <obrien@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Joel Mc Graw <jpmcgraw1@home.com>, freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Alpha wannabe newbie--what hardware? Message-ID: <20000610112441.B33942@freebie.wbnet> In-Reply-To: <20000609184517.A62897@dragon.nuxi.com>; from obrien@FreeBSD.ORG on Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 06:45:17PM -0700 References: <3942D275.48165F30@home.com> <20000609184517.A62897@dragon.nuxi.com>
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On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 06:45:17PM -0700, David O'Brien wrote: > 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. And you might need another SCSI controller. The MX5 variant (as opposed to the GL variant) does not have an onboard SCSI controller. And the NT variants will most likely have an Adaptec PCI SCSI controller which cannot be booted from using the SRM console. Or you can use an IDE disk of course. > 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"). But without external cache module it will also run fine, so if you can't get that would also be a nice machine. With L3 is nicer of course. -- Wilko Bulte FreeBSD, the power to serve http://www.freebsd.org http://www.nlfug.nl To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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