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Welcome Nick, |
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|
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> Anyone who has one of these machines, or knows anything about them, |
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> please let me know the goings on. |
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I have an AlphaServer 1000 4/233. I think it is pretty similar to what |
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you've got. A few things I ran into during the install.... |
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The CD-ROM drive wouldn't boot the live CD. I'm not sure if you'll run |
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into the same problem since the drive was really old and could have |
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just been broken. I replaced it with a used SCSI CD-ROM for $10 from |
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the local computer store and it booted just fine. |
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|
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If it doesn't power on at all, make sure the top panel of the case is |
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on and properly in place. The middle of the top panel of the case has a |
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small piece of metal oriented downwards. When the top panel is put back |
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in place properly, the small piece of metal will press down on a |
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switch. When the switch isn't pressed down, the system will refuse to |
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power on. |
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> Anyone who wants to tell a first time Alpha user some advice, I'm |
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> listening. :) |
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A few things to remember when partitioning.... "the first cylinder |
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cannot be used as the [bootloader] image will be placed there," so you |
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should start your partitions after the first cylinder. This is in the |
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documentation, but is easy to miss. Also, the bootloader (aboot) can |
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only boot kernels from ext2 and ext3 partitions. If you want to use |
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another filesystem for the root filesystem, you'll need to create a |
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separate /boot partition. |
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You CFLAGS should look like this "-mcpu=ev4 -pipe -O2 -mieee" |
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I might be wrong about the mcpu value (it could be ev45), check the |
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"cpu model" line in /proc/cpuinfo to see which is correct. The -mieee |
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enables full IEEE floating point support. |
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Documentation is available here: |
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http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/doc/index.xml |
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You can ask for help on this mailing list, in #gentoo-alpha on |
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irc.freenode.net, and on the forums in the "Alternative Architecture" |
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forum. Bugs can be reported on http://bugs.gentoo.org |
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I hope that helped. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. |
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|
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-Thomas |
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|
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PS: if you want to impress your friends, you can change the text |
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displayed on the LCD by typing "SET OCP_TEXT MyText" (without quotes) |
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into the SRM console and rebooting. A picture of this is on my blog |
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http://mediumbagel.org/nucleus/index.php?itemid=9&catid=4 |
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