Welcome Nick,

> Anyone who has one of these machines, or knows anything about them, 
> please let me know the goings on.

I have an AlphaServer 1000 4/233. I think it is pretty similar to what
you've got. A few things I ran into during the install....

The CD-ROM drive wouldn't boot the live CD. I'm not sure if you'll run
into the same problem since the drive was really old and could have
just been broken. I replaced it with a used SCSI CD-ROM for $10 from
the local computer store and it booted just fine.

If it doesn't power on at all, make sure the top panel of the case is
on and properly in place. The middle of the top panel of the case has a
small piece of metal oriented downwards. When the top panel is put back
in place properly, the small piece of metal will press down on a
switch. When the switch isn't pressed down, the system will refuse to
power on.

> Anyone who wants to tell a first time Alpha user some advice, I'm 
> listening. :)

A few things to remember when partitioning.... "the first cylinder
cannot be used as the [bootloader] image will be placed there," so you
should start your partitions after the first cylinder. This is in the
documentation, but is easy to miss. Also, the bootloader (aboot) can
only boot kernels from ext2 and ext3 partitions. If you want to use
another filesystem for the root filesystem, you'll need to create a
separate /boot partition.

You CFLAGS should look like this "-mcpu=ev4 -pipe -O2 -mieee"
I might be wrong about the mcpu value (it could be ev45), check the
"cpu model" line in /proc/cpuinfo to see which is correct. The -mieee
enables full IEEE floating point support.

Documentation is available here:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/doc/index.xml

You can ask for help on this mailing list, in #gentoo-alpha on
irc.freenode.net, and on the forums in the "Alternative Architecture"
forum. Bugs can be reported on http://bugs.gentoo.org

I hope that helped. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

-Thomas

PS: if you want to impress your friends, you can change the text
displayed on the LCD by typing "SET OCP_TEXT MyText" (without quotes)
into the SRM console and rebooting. A picture of this is on my blog
http://mediumbagel.org/nucleus/index.php?itemid=9&catid=4