Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 10:06:24 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> Cc: alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Its arrived Message-ID: <4244.869591184@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 22 Jul 1997 14:40:09 BST." <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970722142115.445N-100000@herring.nlsystems.com>
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> My alpha loan machine just arrived! Does anyone have a plan on how to > start off this port? I guess installing NetBSD would be a good start. > Does anyone think Linux/alpha is worth looking at? Great, really glad to hear that! I heard from DG that his machine has arrived also, so now if Peter and Warner would like to chime in as to the status of their shipments, perhaps we can finally put the whole Digital loan arrangement hassles behind us and get on with the actual port. ;-) Installing NetBSD would probably not be a bad idea at all, though if you're looking for an environment from which to bootstrap your efforts (that being why there are 2 drives in those machines with only one actually populated :-) then you're probably best off with what you've got installed on it right now - Digital UNIX. DUX is a stable development platform, it has a decent toolchain (and a compiler which generally produces better code that gcc at present) and all the X frobs you could possibly want (plus some you probably won't, like CDE :-). Of course, you also don't get the source. That's the really big disadvantage of running DUX - you can't see what's going on under the hood, so to speak. I'll also admit that pure laziness largely dictated my own choice - I looked at the NetBSD installation and thought "It's distributed as an rz25 disk image... Hmmmm. How very interesting. Now where did I leave that Digital UNIX CDROM?" :-) Before that, I ran Red Hat Linux just to see what they were up to and I wasn't much impressed. You couldn't even build a working kernel from the sources distributed with Red Hat 4.1 (something which RH admitted to) and stability was not all that marvelous - I managed to hang the system quite often just while playing with various X utilities. Getting a reasonable set of sources for RedHat installed, after being used to our own /usr/src tree, was also a nightmare by comparison. :) Jordan
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