Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 19:16:17 +0100 (BST) From: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Its arrived Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970722191009.341D-100000@herring.nlsystems.com> In-Reply-To: <4244.869591184@time.cdrom.com>
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On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > 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 :-) Hmm. I can only see one drive in this one. There is space for another so I might just buy one. 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 :-). Well I have the machine up and running in DUX and it seems OK so far. I even 'improved' our NFS interoperability a bit, working around some bogosities in DUX's NFS client. > > 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?" :-) I hope that we can improve on NetBSD's alpha install a little... That is some way down the line though. > > 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. :) I will probably buy a copy of RedHat anyway just to see what it looks like and what the install is like. -- Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com Nonlinear Systems Ltd. Phone: +44 181 951 1891 Fax: +44 181 381 1039
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