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Debian

Recycling Vintage Alphas with Debian 193

Posted by timothy from the be-your-own-curator dept.
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."
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Recycling Vintage Alphas with Debian More

Recycling Vintage Alphas with Debian

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  • DECstation != Alpha (Score:4, Informative)

    by xmedh02 ( 100813 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @02:51AM (#3036622) Homepage
    The DECstation is not based on the Alpha processor,
    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.

    • 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:

      • I have no floppy drive. The firmware supports an ethernet boot, but it only supports MOPD, not BOOTP.
      • I can't find any drivers written to support the machine's TurboChannel bus.

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Type 'DEC 3000' into google to find the linux port. It doesn't seem to have been maintained for a while.

        You could try netbsd/alpha which apparently has full support.

      • Re:DECstation != Alpha (Score:4, Informative)

        by PapaZit ( 33585 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @08:58AM (#3037273)
        NetBSD [netbsd.org] supports MOP and can be used to boot a DECstation (both the older MIPS based ones and the handful of Alpha based ones that use MOP).

      • 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]

        Linux/Alpha is unlikely to support the TURBOchannel-based Alpha systems in the near (or any) future (this is the DEC 3000 series of workstations). The reason for this is two-fold: first, these machines have an I/O system that is very different from PCI-based machines and therefore do not look anything like PCs (e.g., pretty much all drivers would have to be written from scratch). Second, with the advent of PCI, the TURBOchannel is pretty much dead technology (for better or worse) and it just isn't all that much fun to develop software for dead technology (on the other hand, it may soon be possible to buy such systems cheaply, which would make them more interesting to Linux users, I suppose).

        If you have such a machine and want to run a free OS, look for the BSD's. At least one of them supports the 3000 series.

        Al.
    • thanks a lot for telling them. i have a decstation 240, and have been running netbsd on it for 3 years now, i don't see why this is news.
  • Someone on here will know this.

    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?

    • DECstations were mips based. Alphas started up in the Alphaserver and Alphastation lines. DEC didn't want to wait til their chip was ready, to sell a new risc workstation, and for once in their history they were willing to buy externally. Wish someone would give me a free alpha, its the last DEC box I need to have one of everything (pdp, check, vax, check, decstation, check, alpha... *boohoo*).
    • The article actually described installing Debian on an AlphaStation 250, which obviously uses an Alpha CPU, not DECstation which uses a MIPS CPU. Sometimes, I wonder whether the submitter or the moderator actually read the referred articale before they posted it.

    • Re:DEC Station != MIPS ? (Score:3, Informative)

      by JeffL ( 5070 )
      Some of the early turbochannel alphas, had badges saying DECstation on the front. The Personel DECStation 25 (a 25mhz mips R3000) and the Alpha 300 series even shared the same box. I think it is an Alpha 400 series maybe, that I am recalling with that label. I don't think the Alphastation and Alphaserver names were used until the PCI based systems.

      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.
      • Aah...back in the good old days I had two DECstations running my life. (The good old days are '98, '99, btw.) At CMU there are at least ten or fifteen DECstations thrown out every week. I picked up a nice 5000/125 and set it up as an X display, webserver, and mail system. It was pretty groovy. I could xhost Netscape from the campus UNIX system, and use the machine to its fullest extent.

        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 =)
  • is a nearby CS department.

    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.
    • SunPC accelerator???? It's only a 486 in there. Oh, and it was only supported in Solaris up to 2.5.1 with shaky support in 2.6. Anything later than that and it won't work. Also, it wasn't too hot at running anything other than DOS/Win3.x, with shaky support for Win95. It might run linux, but I'd doubt it.
    • ...Or dot-bomb auction-offs (although these are getting a little thin on the ground by now). Last year, I got a rather nice Sun Ultra 5 for a budget price. It's reasonably fast (333MHz, 512MB RAM, so it can actually hack running Gnome )

  • Great stuff (Score:4, Informative)

    by dciman ( 106457 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @02:56AM (#3036627) Journal
    I have two old DEC Multia's powered by 166 mhz Alphas. I think it is wonderful to see some attention being given to these fun older platforms. For the longest time I was just messing with old builds of RH on them.... but Debian is the way to go for sure. I've played around with some of the BSD's (I run FreeBSD on my desktop), but didn't ahve much luck. Debain is the next best pick for me.

    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)

      by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:02AM (#3036637)
      The Multia makes a terrific network appliance. With its 2 PCMCIA slots, PCI slot, network port, and SCSI port, it's absolutely packed with ability. It can be an 802.11b access point, 802.11b bridge, file+print server, NAT router and firewall, DNS cache, HTTP cache, and ssh gateway all at the same time. It's an insane little machine.

      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.

    • My primary machine right now is a 533sx, still an alpha. I run redhat on it because frankly, debian imho still sucks on alpha.
      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)

    by NiftyNews ( 537829 )
    Man, if I cluster a few dozen I might be able to gather up 350Mhz to run a wicked Quake1 server!
    • Get a bad ass voodo card and run GLquake on it.
      They opensourced it right?.
    • i have a Multia's (166 mhz alpha) sitting in my closet that used to be an awesome q2 server. at lan parties, everyone would comment on just how damn smooth it felt playing on that box. it made local clients play like *glass*. them were the days. <snif>
      • So a Multia would make a very good Quake or QII server. The server doesn't need to do 3D graphics, it just needs to track the positions of all the players, rockets, etc. This is FPU-heavy, but the Alpha's FPU was always better than the Pentiums of the time. Although the integer processing wasn't much faster, an Alpha could smoke any Pentium at, e.g., rendering.

  • where are they finding these? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by foonf ( 447461 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @02:57AM (#3036630) Homepage
    I've often been intrigued by some of the older Unix workstations, particularly Alphas (for their wide compatibility with PC hardware, of which I have an abudance, and the mystique they carried when they were new). Articles like this insist that people are just throwing these things away, and you can get truckloads of them for nominal cost.

    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.
    • > 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

      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.

    • 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.

      • I've got a 533mhz 164SX that i got on ebay 2-3 years ago here ($250 for the board with cpu at the time). It works great and is a decent speed. (the noname 21064 that it replaced was painfully slow)

        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)

          by JeffL ( 5070 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @04:49AM (#3036839) Homepage
          I am still running two of these (533mhz 164SX) machines as general login and computing servers. For some reason people really like to use xdm on these old alphas from their Windows boxes. I even setup a nice dual processor Intel machine with loads of memory running Debian and the latest gnome and kde, but nobody seems interested in using that.

          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.
    • I have a (couple) of multias. The one I use acts as a dialup box, wireless AP, router, firewall, web cache etc. On odd occasions I even play mp3s. The others are spares for when something dies (they cost me nothing).

      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..
    • wellll most are getting them from work. Yes, most companies have policies that state that the employee cant benifit from what they throw away, etc... I got 2sgi workstations and a sgi server from work that we were "destroying" basically replace everything you rescue with a old 486,etc... as long as the guy running the crusher from "compu-waste co." counts X number of computers was destroyed you are cool to go.

      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.

  • .. 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 :))

    • Actually there is something like that around me. It's called Full Circle Group. I'm in cincinnati ohio (USA). I go volunteer each week with them, their goal is to give the PCs away to schools, but we get tons of stuff like tonight i was helping cause we're getting a shipment of 600 laptops from the IRS, basically they give the stuff to the schools first, but if you're helping out you can get hardware too. My linux users group here got a SparcCenter 2000 and a SparcCenter 2000E from them totally free, here are some pics if you want to see them here [134.543.238.49]. If you're in the cincinnati area feel free to email me at my school address [mailto] and i'll get you more info.

  • Is there room in todays ever growing IT industry for recycled computers? It seems that there are new CPUs being released weekly, each faster then the previous.
    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.
    • A new P4 2Ghz box has a different sort of appeal, compared to a PDP-11/40.

      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.
    • Many of these cast-offs make great webservers, NAT routers, firewalls, DNS servers etc. (and can do all this stuff at once). You don't need vast amounts of computing power for a typical home/small office NAT router or webserver or firewall or DNS server. I'm not spending thousands on the latest Pentium-4 for my NAT router - I'd rather spend a few beans on a cast-off Sun or DEC machine which has some geek appeal precisely because it isn't the ubiquitous Wintel or Lintel system.

  • not all alphas are created equal (Score:4, Informative)

    by NightHwk1 ( 172799 ) <.ten.ksalfytpme. .ta. .noj.> on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:01AM (#3036635) Homepage
    I have a 500mhz Alpha at home that used to be a system for running Lightwave at work.

    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)

      by Styx ( 15057 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:19AM (#3036668) Homepage

      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.

    • My machine uses the AlphaBIOS (NT) firmware and has been running fine with linux since 10/98. You'll need MILO and a small boot partition, though as others have pointed out, flashing it with SRM might be easier. The MILO install is a bit of a pain.

      -- Bob

    • I have two of hose running Debian now. When confronted with AlphaBIOS, just go to the boot options (right above the reinstall NT option), and set to boot off the CD. This will tun MILO, from which you can do the floppy boot/root load to install (I was never able to get install to work off the CD).

      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.a lphalinux.org/faq/alphabios-howto.html (and probably other places) that explains the process in more detail.
    • I love it that everyone here had the same reaction I did. I was shocked and my rescue/hero/hardwarehacker jumped out. We all were agahst that such a fine piece of hardware might go to waste. I have a cluster of p90 through p233's just because I hate to see good old hardware go to waste.

      It has a life, It has a conscienceness, damn you! let the rabbits wear glasses. Save our brothers! ~ Tool

    • You can perfectly install Linux on a Alpha using the ARC, I did this 4 or 5 times using the Alpha addendium from Redhat delivered with Redhat 5.x for Alpha. You really needs this companion if you want to install from ARC. It was delivered in print with my distro but it is also present in the doc section of the CD.

      And yes it is fun to do, but you should have the full 2Mb L2 cache, to do something usefull with it.
    • 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...)

      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...

      --

    • To be precise when Digital came out with Alphas which could run NT the first model was the PWS (Personal Workstation) 500a. It featured the EV56 version of the Alpha chip which included byte-manipulation instructions to speed up stuff under FX!32 [compaq.com] and generally to make the NT port simpler.

      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)

    by AtomicBomb ( 173897 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:05AM (#3036641) Homepage
    Before you can install Debian on an Alpha, you got to first find an Alpha. That's hard to find in Down DownUnder, ie New Zealand (except for my sysadmin, who tends to retire old work machines into his own basement ;-)

    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.

    • Same thing over here in Finland.. a bitch isnt it :(

    • Re:Hard to find outside US (Score:2, Interesting)

      by don.g ( 6394 )
      Trademe is hopeless for any moderately interesting computer gear. This is the auction site that has people selling "100Mhz switch hub"s, and attempts to firewall users from each other in order to be sure of extracting their pound of flesh from each transaction.

      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)

    by Robber Baron ( 112304 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:08AM (#3036648) Homepage
    I want a VMS system! That's what I'd like to get MY hands on an Alpha system for. Either that or I'll have to wait for freeVMS [freevms.org] to get off the ground...hooah!

    • I want a VMS system! That's what I'd like to get MY hands on an Alpha system for.

      You mean likethis [montagar.com]?
      As the page says:

      Licenses are available to members of DECUS, Encompass, or other affiliated Compaq User Group. Both Encompass Associate and Members are eligible. There should be a participating Chapter near you.

      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:

      Use of the Licensed Computer is ONLY FOR NON-COMMERCIAL USES (e.g., home use). As such, you may not use the Licensed Computer for any business purposes whatsoever, e.g., to develop applications for resale, to do business accounting, etc.

      Milalwi

  • History of Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:08AM (#3036649) Homepage Journal
    I remember when Slashdot ran on an old Alpha. Rob kept a Multia/UDB 166MHz at his university - This was the original Slashbox. It may have also run "Chips n' Dips"- for you other 'pre-UID' geezers out there.

    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?

    • Are you sure you're not me? ;-)

      My collection of "Exotic" Unix workstations include:

      • SUN SparcStation20
      • SGI Indigo2 R10000/SI
      • DEC AlphaPC164
      • SUN UltraSparc1 200E (gotta love that hme interface)

      These boxen are fun. Just being able to install Linux on an alpha/sparc with a serial console is an ... unique ... experience.

      • Yeah, That's kind of me... I had 4 Indigo R4000's (Elan, XS24) plus a R3000 for parts. Then the wife got concerned :-)

        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.

    • any idea of the -actual- time frame for these events in 1998? or am i lazy and does /. have a history with graphs of number of users and a hardware used to run it chart somewhere that i don't see.

      just trying to figure out what it was running on when i was first pointed to it ages ago.
    • Yup yup.. looking for WindowMaker dock apps. "Back in my day" we didn't have any of this fancy-schmancy comment stuff. One of my old Pentium 60 linux boxes still has a bookmark titled "Chips n' Dips"

      Josh
    • Who else originally found this place because they were looking for WindowMaker .10 -era related sites, and watched Rob's link collection grow?

      I can't remember what I was looking for, but I remember his cute java game and toonish characters.

    • I remember when Slashdot ran on an old Alpha. Rob kept a Multia/UDB 166MHz at his university - This was the original Slashbox. It may have also run "Chips n' Dips"- for you other 'pre-UID' geezers out there.

      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.

      • You don't RC :-) I remember the firesale as well, and it was mentioned that /. *ran* on one of those, as in, it had already been outgrown... (in fact, there was a second unloading that came a little while later, and I didn't get in on either one :-( ). Now, if *I* RC, the multia was the original beast, and everything else grew from there. Maybe Rob can jump on and clarify.
        • Funny, how much of these historical minutiae about /. stick in memory... These are the remenants of what was my 'goof-off' time at work in those days.

          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!

  • I thought about picking an Alpha up for VMS hacking when I worked at my alma mater. DEC (and then Compaq) were pretty decent about supporting the VMS hobby crowd.

    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 a beowulf cluster of these running debian! ;p

  • :) (Score:1)

    by pkplex ( 535744 )
    Im all for debian and making good use of old pc's :) I have made a couple of both literate non pc literate people smile by installing debian into their old abandoned boxes and setting them up as 56k gateway and as small fileserver for their home or small buisiness network. I hope debian runs on alpha as well as it does on i386 :)

  • What about the BSDs? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:29AM (#3036684) Journal
    I know everyone's sick of hearing that the BSDs out-do Linux, but on non-intel hardware the situation is really quite exaggerated.

    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) ;-).

    • As for the accusations of being i386-only, that's completely false.

      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.
      • What have you been smoking? Linux does far better on i386 than any other architecture. The only reasons I've heard for using Linux are the binary drivers and such that only work on Linux. Of course on non-x86 those don't work anyhow.

        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.).

  • just "DEC" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by treellama ( 526694 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:34AM (#3036694) Homepage

    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)

    by mcelrath ( 8027 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:36AM (#3036699) Homepage
    The alpha is dying slowly. I've been running a homebuilt LX164 board (533MHz 21164) for almost 4 years now.

    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

  • If you want to Recycle AND promote Opensource.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LeSexyLemur ( 560213 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:36AM (#3036703)
    Warning-plug ahead

    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)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:37AM (#3036707) Journal
    Year Machine CPU CLOCK RAM UNIXBench Score
    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)

    by doorbot.com ( 184378 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:52AM (#3036732) Journal
    Although this one throws in a few SPARC and VAX machines...

    http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/0 49208 [newsforge.com]

    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?
    • 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?

      Funny you should say that. I have a qube2 so I'm gonna try this soon:

      debian-cobalt [transvirtual.com]
    • The MIPS Cobalts do run Linux (2.0.x kernel). I'd like to upgrade mine to 2.4.17; it's been done, I just can't find a HOWTO on how to do it. (The CobaltRaQs don't appear to have Lilo, and I've not found any docs on how to make it boot a different kernel than the one that comes with the machine. Since the system is not physically accessable to me, I really need good, workable HOWTO information so I don't break the box).

  • Lessons learned from my SmartAlpha Station A10 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thagg ( 9904 ) <thadbeier@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @03:56AM (#3036738) Journal
    I've been a fan of the Alpha chip since its debut in the February, 1993 Communications of the ACM back in 1990. Alpha was the great hope, a new chip designed from the ground up as a scientific and technical powerhouse. I had read Darryll Strauss's great article about harnessing 166 433 MHz Alphas toward the production of Titanic, and that only whet my appetite further. When I read that Samsung was going to be pushing Alpha workstations, I exercised my most persuasive writing skills and requested a machine for development, with the idea that it might be used to further the use of Alphas in visual effects work.

    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
    • I think what everyone wants to know is...

      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)

        by Thagg ( 9904 )
        Actually, no, one of my coworkers did that shot of Penelope in the nude. We had been wearing a little bit of clothing on the set which we had to get rid of.

        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
  • Well, I'll let just let the natural forces over at eBay figure that out then! You see I am going to be selling my own Alphastation 166 - or is that AlphaStation? - on that there eBay site there.

    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?!
    &#60/SKITZO&#62
  • Yes! You too can take a system that was once valued at more than $10,000 and place Debian Linux on it and make it into those dsl/cable routers you see in retail stores go for around $100!! Or even into a Linksys Gigadrive that goes for $700!!

    It is a pitty to see such fine hardware depreciate in value faster than a Ford Pinto.
  • This is a DECstation [coed.org] after recieving a nice beating and causing the cops to be called on me and a friend. Hopefully having this in comments won't get it slashdoted -- it's no longer on a university network...
  • Reading this atricle brought back memories of running NT on some Alpha servers. The Alpha was awesome hardware and its very sad that it fell victim to the Wintel meatgrinder. The technology was superior to the Intel chips, sadly DEC could never match the marketing muscle of Intel. Did Intel lean on Microsoft to drop the NT version for the Alpha?
    Still for those who have access to an Alpha you have my best wishes. Its great kit.
  • At least I hope so. Debian supports some eclectic hardware but it sure doesn't neccesarilly come with boot disks that will actually work with your machine.

  • If you write free software, get a 64 bit platform! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cef ( 28324 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @08:59AM (#3037275)
    There is this wonderful thing that people say when their package doesn't compile on another platform...

    "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.
    • I completely agree.

      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!
  • Not that we have any Alphas to give away, but you can try out Debian running on a couple of Alphas in the Compaq Test Drive Program. We also have Red Hat, SuSE, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64 Unix (formerly Digital Unix), and OpenVMS running on Alphas in the program, and though we cannot provide official support, we are always happy to respond to user questions and requests. Learn more about the Test Drive Program [compaq.com], see what we have running now [compaq.com], or sign up for an account [compaq.com].

  • My Alpha won't run Linux (Score:3, Interesting)

    by IPFreely ( 47576 ) <mark@mwiley.org> on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @09:43AM (#3037385) Homepage Journal
    I got an old DEC Server 3000 Model 500 last year as a give away. (150 MHz 61064, Turbochannel). I tried for a while to get Linux to run on it, but to no good. After much searching around, I discovered that the Linux kernel had never been completely ported to turbochannel. (some attempts were started but apparently never completed).

    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.

  • I have an old Multia, that I've been trying to resurrect with RH7.1, but everytime I do an install I get file system corruption (ext2) when I start doing anything serious.

    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?

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