Recycling Vintage Alphas with Debian 193
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."
DECstation != Alpha (Score:4, Informative)
but rather on MIPS R2000-R4000. They were not very powerful, say, 386 or 486 level. Alpha was the
next generation after MIPS based DECs.
Re:DECstation != Alpha (Score:2, Informative)
This is untrue. I have a DECstation 3000 Model 300LX here under my desk that's based on the AXP architecture and has an Alpha 21064-AA.
I've attempted to install Linux on my DECstation before, but so far I've been blocked by two things:
If anyone else has gotten Linux working under similar circumstances and can offer any help, I'd be happy to hear it.
D
Re:DECstation != Alpha (Score:2, Informative)
You could try netbsd/alpha which apparently has full support.
Re:DECstation != Alpha (Score:4, Informative)
Re:DECstation != Alpha (Score:2)
I can't find any drivers written to support the machine's TurboChannel bus.
Having had a couple of TurboChannel machines kicking around a few of years I went through the same cycle. Linux doesn't support TurboChannel at all, but some versions of BSD do, from the Linux/Alpha FAQ [nctu.edu.tw]
Al.Re:DECstation != Alpha (Score:2)
DEC Station != MIPS ? (Score:2, Informative)
I thought the "DEC Station" was a MIPS beast and the Alphas went by another name?
Anyone know? Were there both MIPS- and Alpha-based DEC Stations?
Re:DEC Station != MIPS ? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:DEC Station != MIPS ? (Score:1)
Re:DEC Station != MIPS ? (Score:3, Informative)
All of my old DECstations (mips and alpha) are sitting in a storage room because it is too much bureaucracy to throw them away, but they just aren't worth pulling out and playing with.
I am probably getting some of the names confused, but this is definately a problem that Digital (aka DEC) perpetuated with their constant renaming of stuff. Talk about a company being run into the ground by poor marketing. Since I have been using it, their Unix OS has been called OSF/1, Digital Unix, and Tru64. At some point in the mid-90s, DEC decided that years of name recognition and reputation under the name DEC was too much, so they wanted everybody to call them Digital.
Re:DEC Station != MIPS ? (Score:2)
It had a really, really loud set of RZ56 (?) full-height hard drives that made tons of noise. Fortunately, the interface parts (monitor, keyboard, mouse) are connected to a 12 foot tether, so I could put the CPU under my bed and have all of the interface portions on my desk. And it heated the room. Good machine =)
Re:DEC Station != MIPS ? (Score:2)
Another good source of old boxes (Score:2, Informative)
The one at my local university [vuw.ac.nz] recently got rid of around ten SPARCstation 5s. One is sitting on my desk. (running Solaris, though, as I want to use the SunPC accelerator it has).
You have to be careful, though - the 170Mhz turbosparc in this isn't supported very well under linux - it froze in the middle of X - although OpenBSD worked quite nicely.
Re:Another good source of old boxes (Score:2)
Re:Another good source of old boxes (Score:2)
Great stuff (Score:4, Informative)
I highly recommend picking up one of these machines if you want somethign fun to play around with. They can be had for next to nothing on Ebay or Yahoo Auctions. Mine cost me 35 bucks a piece I believe...and they had never been opened form the packing! Integrated sound.....ethernet, PC Card slot.... and the slide out mothboard tray just looks sweet:)
Re:Great stuff (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Yup, my starter alpha was a multia. (Score:1)
You guys are forgetting that debian isn't the only thing to run on these boxes. Slackware has an alpha port, redhat works, suse does as well.
Freebsd runs very nicely on these machines - in fact, the only reason I'm not running it now is because my video card is flakey under it, but I have an alphastation as a firewall running it.
Compaq even has betas of their fortran, c, and c++ compiler to make things that much smoother.
Awesome (Score:2, Funny)
Or better yet... (Score:1)
They opensourced it right?.
Re:Awesome (Score:1)
Actually, Alphas had good FPUs (Score:2)
where are they finding these? (Score:3, Interesting)
But everything I've seen, on eBay and elsewhere on the net, has been, while maybe inexpensive and even cheap, totally out of proportion to the cost for older PC and even Mac hardware. As the benchmarks in that article show, a 21066 Multia with no cache is barely faster than a 486 at half the clock speed. And yet a loaded multia can still sell for upwards of $200. And the AT-format 21066 board based on the same architecture as the Multia can cost $50 alone (with CPU). I can get a box of 486 or Pentium boards for that much. And of course there is much more abundant binary-packaged software that will run on those.
Re:where are they finding these? (Score:2, Interesting)
There really isnt any idea - imho - to use a box of 486's or Pentiums. You can basically use a couple of older comps for firewalling and a small http/ftp/whatever-server but what then? no idea trying to build up a cluster of them since you can buy a cheap Duron or something and you'll have way more power for less hassle (unless you just want to toy around which is fine).
But, again imo, it's alot geekier and cooler to have that firewall or small http-server running on a piece of hardware that is exotic while maybe not much more powerful than a Pentium. Which is probably why they are abit more expensive than that run-of-the-mill Pentium.
Re:where are they finding these? (Score:1)
You could look for an AlphaPC164 (or SX/LX) -- with matching CPU -- on eBay. They are OEM/Evaluation boards from DEC, fit in a standard ATX cabinet, and use pretty normal RAM, etc.
That's how I got my AlphaPC164 and AlphaPC164SX
Final word of advice: Don't buy an AlphaPC164SX without a CPU, CPUs for them (21164PC) are pretty much impossible to find.
AlphaPC 164's are good (Score:2)
Another benefit of using anything other than x86 CPUs is that they are much less likely to be broken into as script kiddie exploits are more common for the lousy popular architecture. Now that there are decent open source web browsers available you can even use it as a desktop machine.
Re:AlphaPC 164's are good (Score:4, Informative)
The old turbochannel alphas had some pretty serious reliability problems (a 90 day warranty on a $7000 computer!?) I had most of the DEC components (i.e., not 3rd party stuff, like disks) on my two turbochannel alphas replaced several times under maintenaince before getting to board revisions that could last more than 6 months.
However, the PCI based alphas I have seem to be totally bullet proof. I think in the whole time I have been running them, once lost a disk, which one can hardly blame DEC/Compaq for.
For integer stuff the 164SX machines are bit slow, probably comparable to a 350mhz PII, but for floating point, they are probably better than a 700mhz PIII (though I haven't benchmarked these thngs in years, so I may be remembering wrong). Of course they don't compare in any way to a $50 1Ghz Duron.
Re:where are they finding these? (Score:2, Interesting)
Out of all the computers I have, I believe it will out-live the others thanks to the functionality it has and the purpose I use it for. For what you can get for $50 or less, it is worth every sence.
I plugged a 80211b pcmcia card into mine and have it act as a router.. For $50, that is cheaper than any other access point solution I know of.
It also has SCSI, IDE, 1xPCI, 2xPCMCIA and the list goes on..
Re:where are they finding these? (Score:2)
NOTE: this only works for you if your boss isnt an asshole. Corperate policies are very stupid when it comes to the old PC's. (no you cant buy them, donate them to any charity, etc...) so if your boss realizes that the policy is stupid and the audit trail can be covered you're golden.
i wish.. (Score:1)
.. they'd have of those over here in Finland but im guess im all out of luck. Haven't seen any Alphas for sale except for a small shop that sold off old Alphas and Sparcs for insane prices. "local ebay" doesnt really hold any either though i check there every now and then..
I just wish there was a real computer recycling company/organisation that people would give they're old comps to that would more or less give the stuff away and if intrest for some particular machine hasnt been sparked for say 2 weeks they'd take it to the real recycling center. Of course there isnt really any money in a company working that way which is why there isnt one but it'd be neat.. (another what-to-do if I happen to win a lottery, would be a fun project
Re:i wish.. (Score:1)
Re:i wish.. (Score:1)
Re:i wish.. (Score:1)
Perhaps they borrowed it, the rascals.
Recycled Computers??????? (Score:1)
New software makes use of the new hardware, often rendering the old hardware useless due to performance requirements.
So how does one find a recycled computer useful? Of course there are numerous computing tasks that require little processing power... but why go for recycled hardware, unless you have no funds for the new and shiny.
As for pure geek factor... well new geek toys have large geek appeal, old toys don't. Its something about that new hardware smell (hmmm... maybe if they sprayed those alphas with that electricity fregrance for geeks...?)
Finally, old hardware chews power. Its expensive to run because of it as it takes more real time (thus power) to perform the same tasks.
Re:Recycled Computers??????? (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't run them because they're low power or because they're fast. It's the appeal of playing with what is now comparitively exotic hardware. You don't *need* to run new software on older machines. It'd be much more satisfying to get the aforementioned PDP-11 connected to the internet then a bright and shiny new computer. Particularly as I don't think there's an IP stack for RT-11.
Re:Recycled Computers??????? (Score:2)
not all alphas are created equal (Score:4, Informative)
Since both Microsoft and NewTek decided to stop supporting the Alpha architecture, its been sitting in a corner collecting dust.
I attempted to install Linux on this beast about 3 months ago, and realized that it had a BIOS specifically made for WinNT.. a blue menu with no such option as "switch to digital unix" as the article mentions. No way to boot from a floppy or CD either. (though i think it has an option to reinstall NT...)
After spending long hours reading HowTos and articles I finally just gave up.
If you plan on buying a cheap Alpha system for these purposes, do some research first on the model and BIOS type.
But most *can* run Linux (Score:5, Informative)
No, but most Alphas can be flashed with new firmware [logout.sh], and enable you to use SRM [logout.sh](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 [debian.org].
Best of luck with it, it can be quite fun.
Re:not all alphas are created equal (Score:1)
-- Bob
Re:not all alphas are created equal (Score:1)
More information used to be available from www.alphalinux.com, but they've been down a couple months. A HOWTO is stored at http://thsun1.jinr.ru/file-archive/doc/alpha/www.
Re:not all alphas are created equal (Score:2)
It has a life, It has a conscienceness, damn you! let the rabbits wear glasses. Save our brothers! ~ Tool
Re:not all alphas are created equal (Score:1)
And yes it is fun to do, but you should have the full 2Mb L2 cache, to do something usefull with it.
Re:not all alphas are created equal (Score:2)
That sounds like the ARC firmware. I've used it many times to install Linux, though it was about 5 years ago now. Check out a thread I contributed to at google groups [google.com]. There are some useful links there.
Further, I seem to recall that this post [geocrawler.com] describes roughly what I used to do on these machines.
Sounds as though you gave up without really trying...
--
Re:not all alphas are created equal (Score:2, Informative)
One of the key features of the PWS was that it had a "dual mode" BIOS, one was the SRM console which all old Digital OSF/1 hands will immediately recognise as the ">>>" prompt and the other was the AlphaBIOS which provided emulation of a PC BIOS services for the NT side. The 500a model only shipped with AlphaBIOS, the 500au shipped with SRM.
"Where can I find SRM?" is a frequent request on the tru64-unix-managers mailing lists, you might want to search the archives [cjb.net]
to check if you can simply download and upgrade the firmware (it is freely available from the Compaq support web site). I seem to recall that this was not possible because the AlphaBIOS won't let you do it.
Hard to find outside US (Score:3, Interesting)
I monitored an online auction site (trademe.co.nz) for a while, with no luck. And these old workstations seem to be quite common and quite cheap, say in eBay... I am so jealous.
Re:Hard to find outside US (Score:1)
Re:Hard to find outside US (Score:1)
Re:Hard to find outside US (Score:2, Interesting)
The best I've found there was a m68k Mac IIci - slap a SCSI disk in there, load on NetBSD (linux kernel panics when it tries to network), and grumble at the 64MB address space per process limitations.
Forget Debian... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Forget Debian... (Score:2)
You mean likethis [montagar.com]?
As the page says:
The VMS Hobbyist license program has been around for quite a while (several years at least). You can't use it to develop anything for sale, but most people just want to explore and port open source software anyway. The license says:
Milalwi
History of Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
Even then, Slash traffic was heavy. Mod:perl groaned on this host! It was a testament to the DEC folks that it ran with more than a couple hundred connections at all! After all, the Multia was a severely compromised Alpha design, which mated the CPU to a PC-style I/O bus.
Bandwidth consumption forced the removal of Slashdot to real hosting. Was this in '98? Anyhow, shortly thereafter VA donations (pre Andover) moved Slashdot onto dual PII's, and the mighty growth of Slashcode ensued! That's about the time my own Multia started to overheat and require BLOWING INTO THE CASE before rebooting. I put Debian Ham on a K5, and moved my RISC fetish onto early UltraSparc and SGI R10000.
Who else originally found this place because they were looking for WindowMaker .10 -era related sites, and watched Rob's link collection grow?
Re:History of Slashdot (Score:1)
Are you sure you're not me? ;-)
My collection of "Exotic" Unix workstations include:
These boxen are fun. Just being able to install Linux on an alpha/sparc with a serial console is an ... unique ... experience.
Re:History of Slashdot (Score:2)
I gave one of these to a buddy who has a full VAX. He's the kind of guy who REALLY likes MIPS assembly language. I have an SGI 3030/80 (1984 vintage ATT Unix - pre SCSI) that she wants me to unload - but it still sometimes boots!
Lots of my machines run the original OS - But I have various BSD and Linux running on Sparcs and Alphas. I would go for Linux on the Indigo2, but It seems a real waste of the MaxImpact.
Re:History of Slashdot (Score:2)
just trying to figure out what it was running on when i was first pointed to it ages ago.
Re:History of Slashdot (Score:1)
Josh
Re:History of Slashdot (Score:2)
I can't remember what I was looking for, but I remember his cute java game and toonish characters.
Re:History of Slashdot (Score:2)
IIRC, I read about the big Multia fire sale on Slashdot, which is when Rob got his, so it came after Chips n' Dips and early Slashdot. I think slashdot.org was originally hosted on some PC Rob was using as a server at his job.
Who else originally found this place because they were looking for WindowMaker .10 -era related sites, and watched Rob's link collection grow?
I'm one of the crew who followed a link from MacOS Rumors, during Rob and Jeff's ill-fated partnership with Ryan Meader. That, by the way, is part of why there are a disproportionate number of Mac users here.
Re:History of Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:History of Slashdot (Score:2)
Damned if I can recall half as much detail about what I was really working on at the time! --I convinced the rest of the staff that it was pretty important for me to regularly build the latest 2.1.xx series though!
Alpha & VMS, Old Boxes & Afterlife (Score:1)
I'm continuously amazed at just how cheap hardware has gotten and how sweet various distros of *nix run on yesteryear's boxes. Last month I grabbed ten loaded Pentium 233 MMX boxes off Ebay for $890 (with shipping) and am pressing them into service as workstations.
Imagine.. (Score:1)
:) (Score:1)
What about the BSDs? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Linux benefits of commercial software (Corel, Real, Sun) don't apply to non-x86 architectures, and the huge flock of Linux developers are working on the i386 development... The other platforms are a hacky afterthought. Meanwhile, the BSDs are no different from i386, to VAX, to Alpha, to Sparc, to MVE.
So does anyone have one good reason to run Linux on non-i386 hardware (not that the reasons to run it on x86 hardware are good)
Re:What about the BSDs? (Score:2, Informative)
That's one of the main reason to choose Debian. If something doesn't build correctly on all arches (autobuilders), then it'll get a serious-severity bug against it, and that version won't make it to testing.
Our current Debian Project Leader (Ben Collins) is the lead SPARC porter, while Bdale Garbee, who came 4th IIRC is the main IA64 porter, and Branden Robinson is active in PowerPC stuff. Porters are given a high status in Debian as it's absolutely essential.
Do your homework sometime. One of the main reasons to choose Debian is the diversity of architecture support.
Re:What about the BSDs? (Score:2)
Secondly, I care less what debian is doing... Debian is not Linux, and I never commented on what debian was or was not.
Linux development is completely focused on x86 platforms, even if Debian people are porting everything they possibly can, Linux still isn't being developed for anything but x86.
Besides that point. I have tried Debian on my Alpha, it is VERY flaky and unstable. It does some crazy hacks to work properly (EXT2 on top of a TRU64 partition, et al.).
Re:What about the BSDs? (Score:2)
I don't think judging OpenBSD based on it's -current branch is very fair do you? Wait until 3.1 and then see how good it is. Of course, the next version should have XFree86 support as well.
just "DEC" (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a DEC 3000/400 (no "station") that I got virtually for free a couple years back. I ran netbsd [netbsd.org] (which has much better hardware support on turbochannel machines than alpha linux, plus it's not linux ::ducks::) on it for a long time, it was a web, name, ftp server, you get the picture. 150 or more days uptime, only interrupted by power outages, and it ran in a closet so must have been at least 80 degrees F in there continuously. When I went to move it, I was puzzled at the sticky grey goo underneath the machine until I realized it had melted its plastic feet!
It's a great machine, incredibly reliable, unfortunately the days of these beasts being useful are past I think. It's just so cheap to get an x86 (or in my case an iBook with a dead screen) machine to replace them which is faster, cooler, more energy efficient, and quieter.
Of course the coolness factor of running this old workhorse still appeals to me, perhaps when I get a house with a basement (alleviating the noise and heat) I'll set it up once more.
Death of the alpha (Score:5, Insightful)
As others have pointed out the 2.4 kernel series has been painful on alpha [slashdot.org]. This is symptomatic of the fact that the alpha/linux community has died, completely. The two big alpha sites, Alphalinux [alphalinux.org] (referenced in the article), and Alpha News [alphanews.net] have disappeared. I've been checking almost daily for months. In the last few months I've had a very hard time finding packages. I installed redhat 4 years ago, after a painful wrestling with the pre-release debian of the day. Now redhat 7.2 for alpha is still not out yet, despite the fact that it's been out for i386 since the beginning of October. Redhat sees the writing on the wall too. Their rawhide likewise hasn't seen a new package in a good while. Now I wish I had tried harder with Debian.
I've always hand-installed a lot of packages, but lately, since I can't find binary updates to redhat at all, I've been compiling more and more by hand. And lots of them don't compile. 64-bit cleanness is not something most programmers do by default. (hint: do not use long unless you really know what you're doing!)
It is ironic that in this day where everyone is anticipating the next great 64-bit chip (x86-64/Itanic), I am contemplating moving back to the 32-bit world, after using 64 bits for 4 years, because maintaining it is becoming a chore. DEC/Compaq/HP has really shot themselves in the foot. Between all their mergers and questionable "roadmap", they've alienated their fans, supporters, customers, employees, and even the Hewlett family. Their engineers left for AMD (and you wondered why the K7 was so much faster than the K6 -- buy Athlons!) their compiler guys and patents left for Intel (boycott Intel!), and there's little left of the original vision.
So all you tinkerers out there, I encourage you to buy up all the surplus Miata's you can find! And help the plight of Linux/Alpha and 64-bit clean code across the OSS landscape! Because 64-bit processors are going to become more prevalent, not less, and the world needs people on 64-bit machines to test stuff! (only about 5% of the packages I run into don't compile and run out of the box on alpha/linux -- but those 5% need to be fixed!) And everyone buy a USB PCI card for it too, because the current USB drivers suck! They can hang my kernel.
Oh, and an alpha makes a great firewall/router since all the script-kiddie buffer overflow hacks don't work. (all the script kiddies use buffer overflow attacks that insert x86 code onto the stack...this obviously doesn't work on alpha) A little bit of security through obscurity can help. But don't neglect real security!
--Bob
Re:Death of the alpha (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Death of the alpha (Score:1)
I want linux over windows because I don't want to ever have to reinstall.
Now, If I could just "convert" to debian, install packages one-by-one until I have a debian system...then I'd be interested.
-- Bob
Re:Death of the alpha (Score:1)
FreeBSD Alpha Works Great (Score:3, Informative)
alphalinux.org dead? try linuxalpha.org (Score:4, Informative)
The mirror at http://www.linuxalpha.org [linuxalpha.org] seems to be online.
And, RedHat, hasn't given on the Alpha yet, RedHat 7.2 *will* be comming out. They've done a deal with Compaq: see Phillip Copeland (Bryce)'s diary [advogato.org]
But, you're right, more Alpha hackers are always welcome.
Re:Death of the alpha (Score:1, Informative)
Math? (Score:1)
Um...shouldn't that be 2=0?
Re:Math? (Score:2)
-- Bob
If you want to Recycle AND promote Opensource.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am the adminof ACCRC and I thought a plug for the nonprofit I work at is appropriate here.
ACCRC refurbishes computers and donates them to worthy causes. All donated machines go out the door w/ Suse preinstalled and the retail box taped to the side.
Our charter allows us to accept any Technology as a donation. That which can not be placed w/ a worthy cause is used for cool projects in house.
(ie permanent magnet motors in huge old tape drives are being played with for windmill generator possibilities)
If you want to donate, volunteer, or just say "Hi", check out http://www.accrc.org/
END plug
ok
This place rocks I have alot of fun and get to save the world at the same time. 'nuff said
Cheers,
-chris
admin
slashdot reader
he who fears the 'effect'
Latency for firewalls on games (Score:3, Informative)
1992? PC 80486 66MHz 32MB 11.1
1995 Multia Alpha 21066A 166MHz 64MB 12.8
I upgrade my p75 to a netgear router, and my Ping went from 30ms to 10ms. I even tried that freesco floppy router, same thing.
People say that they make good routers, but I want the lowest ping for games. So maybe older machines might good firewalls, if you dont care about ping. Some good benchmarks on firewall/nat latency would be nice. Hell, I still got a sparc 20 that makes a good X terminal, but ill use machines built for low latency firewalls.
-
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. - Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809)
Similar article on NewsForge (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/
And it seems the MIPS-based versions of the respective OSes are coming along; NetBSD will run on your O2 [netbsd.org]. SGI's work on Linux for MIPS is as far as "only Indys have a working XFree86" [sgi.com] although a few other machines will boot Linux.
An interesting question is what about the Cobalt MIPS-based appliances? Don't they run Linux as the x86 ones do? So where's the source code for those?
Re:Similar article on NewsForge (Score:1)
Funny you should say that. I have a qube2 so I'm gonna try this soon:
debian-cobalt [transvirtual.com]
Re:Similar article on NewsForge (Score:2)
Lessons learned from my SmartAlpha Station A10 (Score:5, Insightful)
Shockingly, about three months later, a battered old SmartAlpha Station A10 showed up on my doorstep. I suppose you can tell a workstation from a desktop machine by the gauge of sheet metal, this thing weighs about 50 lbs. At the time I was still under the influence of NT, so I ported all of our code over to NT on the Alpha. It wasn't that hard, but it wasn't that rewarding either. The rest of our shop is SGI machines, and, well, NT isn't Unix.
Then I decided to run Linux on the box. I ordered Red Hat 5.2 from CheapBytes. 5.2 was the latest Red Hat release for Alpha at the time, although they were shipping 6.0 for X86 machines.
We ported all of our SGI software to the Alpha, and used it for a couple of movies, most noteably Woman on Top [imdb.com]. We did some ray tracing using Larry Gritz's BMRT for some of the scenes in the movie, where the power of the Alpha was well used.
After that, I took the machine home, and used it as my home computer until I got a laptop -- and it's been off since then. As promised by the title, here are the lessons learned.
Pro:
Alphas are significantly more finicky about floating point exceptions than the other machines we were using at the time. We found a lot of bugs in our code due to the fact that applications would crash on the Alpha rather than just silently generating bad results.
There are many benefits to using multiple architectures when developing code. It keeps you much more honest. It forces you to keep your build trees in good shape.
Alpha is a 64-bit machine, and it was my first exposure to the fact that long != int. We'll all find this out eventually, sooner is better than later.
Cons:
Alphas are outcasts. That was true three years ago when we got the machine, and it has become dramatically more true now. Finding a decent web browser, for instance, was a challenge. In general, the avalanche of tools that makes Linux so pleasant and productive dries up to a trickle when you look for Alpha tools.
It's very common that programs that you download source for don't quite compile under Alpha. It's not really the fault of those programmers, of course -- they don't have Alpha machines, typically, to test the installation on.
Alphas are just expensive boxes. They will never compete on a MIPS/$ basis. This was true even when they were many times as fast as the Intel chips, and it's becoming more and more true.
Finally, persuing oddball architectures is just typically not a cost-productive way to spend one's time. Of course, I say that -- and I'd sooner die than ever use a Microsoft product
thad
Woman on Top (Score:2)
Were you the one that got to edit the scenes with Penelope Cruz in the nude?
Seriously, I saw the movie while I was dating a Brazilian (her idea, not mine), and I don't remember any scenes in particular that would have required ray tracing. Can you specify the scenes?
Knunov
Re:Woman on Top (Score:2, Interesting)
The big ray-tracing scene was short, as you might expect -- it was tossing the rose from the balcony down to Toninio. We tried rendering the CG rose in RenderMan, and just couldn't get the shadows, bump maps, and translucency to look right. With BMRT it was a piece of cake.
We did all the effects in the movie for a song, just to be able to work on it. Often in the fall, after we've made our numbers for the year, Hammerhead will do an art-house movie like this. Woman on Top was a better movie than people (including Penelope! She never mentions it!) give it credit for. Cruz is simply radiant in the film. Sometimes, movies need just be fun and beautiful.
thad
How much *do* they sell for? (Score:1)
SKITZOWhat is the deal with eBay? . . . Do they need to take a percentage of *every* transaction? . . . What if it's undervalued? . . . Who has the time?! . . . And then there's PayPal! . . . Hey Pal, keep your laws off my fucking cash! . . . Leggo my money, as it were! . . . Eggos, legos, I'm selling it all - but my ego is staying! . . . Here we go again! . . . What is the deal with selling your ego?!
</SKITZO>
Congradulations (Score:2, Funny)
It is a pitty to see such fine hardware depreciate in value faster than a Ford Pinto.
The DECstation ***WAS NOT AN ALPHA*** (Score:2)
Re:The DECstation ***WAS NOT AN ALPHA*** (Score:1)
Re:The DECstation ***WAS NOT AN ALPHA*** (Score:1)
Re:The DECstation ***WAS NOT AN ALPHA*** (Score:1)
Alpha - The best hardware (Score:1)
Still for those who have access to an Alpha you have my best wishes. Its great kit.
easier than sparcstation... (Score:1)
If you write free software, get a 64 bit platform! (Score:3, Interesting)
"But it works on my Pentium!"
So many apps out there are not 64 bit clean, and they will need to be in the not so far future. A hell of a lot of the Debian package people have been doing a brilliant job to make the packages available compile and work on 64 bit platforms. Bdale Garbee [gag.com] is probably the most well known identity working on this effort and has put a lot of effort into porting to Debian to new architectures.
Not all packages are destined to get ported to every architectures (eg: there is no sound device on an S/390, so no real need to have certain sound packages: But don't forget things like network sound architectures!), but most are, and a lot of it is developers who have no understanding of the issues caused by a 64 bit environment.
"But who cares about Alpha?"
If you think Alpha is the only platform that will benefit from 64 bit clean code, think again! There are a fair number of 64 bit platforms, like ia64 and PA-Risc. Fixing such problems will make such software work on all 64 bit platforms.
One last thing to note is that sometimes it's good to have a different perspective on things occasionly. Not everything revolves around the ia32 (i386, etc) platform like everyone generally seems to think.
Porting yields better software (Score:1)
While developing software for a large research project, I did most of the coding on my homebrew Pentium and Alpha ev4 systems. In my experience there were little problems in porting the c++ software between the different architectures, other than some minor problems anyone will experience with different versions of GCC and EGS.
In some cases, this porting back and forward even benefitted in tracing and debuggin some of the obscure data structures I had used.
Therefore, I believe porting in general and specifically wrt. different hardware benefits design en code quality.
Go Alpha GO!
Re:If you write free software, get a 64 bit platfo (Score:1)
Trying out Alphas (Score:2, Informative)
My Alpha won't run Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
I eventually went to NetBSD 1.5 and it booted up and worked fine. It's still alive.
I thought it would be fun, but was a bit dissapointed to discover that it was on the order of a tenth the speed of my Cyrix PR233 machine. I thought an Alpha at 150 could at least keep up with a ~180 MHz X86 processor, but NOOOOOOOO.
Oh, well. It still makes a good Postgresql server.
Re:My Alpha won't run Linux (Score:2)
I'd use Debian if... (Score:2)
I've tried swapping the memory with another machine (my SGI Indy) to no avail. I am wondering if perhaps the SCSI hard drive is dying, or if the machine is just dead.
I'd use Debian if this problem were a RHism, but I'm not going to pull down yet another ISO and waste an evening installing it if not.
Anybody else seen this sort of symptom?
Look past the headline (Score:1)
As for Gnu/Linux, Debian is usually the best bet with diverse, uncommon hardware, including the SGI Indy. You can also find information off of SGI's Open Source and Linux site, and even Red Hat flavored stuff here and there.
The "News" seemed to be that Debian supports obscure and older hardware - the afterthought "with Debian" was relevant for you. While this specific example was old AXPs that can be had for minimal cost, you could have inferred that Debian might also have support for MIPS... which it does. While Debian/BSD still hasn't come into its own yet, you might find that NetBSD can be more stable than Linux in the meantime. But your Indy has choices beyond 5.3+XFS and 6.(0,2,3,5). Have you looked into Windows NT 4.0?
cheers
-castlan