by Joseph Tho » Tue, 04 Jan 2000 04:00:00
I just recently inherited a hand me down XL 266 that had been running
NT. I would like to cut it over to Linux. However, I don't have any
experience with the Alphas. I have downloaded to Redhat 6.1 ISO from
ftp.redhat.com.
Any help for this Alpha newbie would be much appreciated.
Thanks
J2
by Daniel Tryb » Tue, 04 Jan 2000 04:00:00
-Setup ARC to boot MILO (I think you can boot milo right from the cd
within arc (never tried it), else make a milo floppie with the
diskimages contained in /milo/images on cd).
-From MILO boot the linux kernel with the CD as root filesystem
From there the install will be very like installing an i386 machine.
But remember to make a small (few MB are enough) dos partition so you
can boot milo directly form ARC without cds or floppies.
--
Daniel Tryba
1. RedHat 6.1 troubles on an Alpha XL 266
Just this evening I began a painful, and as yet failed, attempt to
reconfigure a newly inherited Alpha XL 266 with RedHat 6.1.
I fought with it very extensively, but, while I could boot MILO from a
floppy, as per reccomendation in the documentation, with the boot menu
configuration, I was unable to successfully boot the kernel off of the CD.
I (obviously) burnt the ISO to a CD (RH 6.1, just downloaded yesterday),
just using Adaptec Easy CD Creator on my home Intel/NT box. Once I was
(finally) able to even figure out the device ID or whatever of the CDROM
(most references suggest scd0 as being common, but it's sr0 on my XL266, at
least), I could begin the boot process according to the instructions
(boot -t sr0:kernels/generic.gz root=/dev/sr) and various permutations and
modifications thereof (all the way to simply trying "sr:" > "cd kernels" >
"boot generic.gz", which began to work). At this stage, however, the kernel
boot process would begin and go through quite a bit of text feedback, but
would fail on a single line (that, as I recall, had something to do with
"vdisk" or something like that -- something which suggested 'virtual') and
kill the boot process. It seemed to have to do with some inability to work
with my hard drives (sda1, 5, and sdb 1, 2, 5), as I recally, but I,
unfortunately, am a few miles away from the machine at the moment and
neglected to write it all down to bring home.
Perhaps more notably, the machine could not view or use any floppies in MILO
mode -- following the README's backup kernel loading option, I created boot
and ramdisk floppies, but could not load the kernel from the boot floppy in
MILO (or even browse on the boot floppy). MILO was, in fact, even unable to
read the very disk off of which it booted -- always giving errors of an
unrecognizeable filesystem (it was just a FAT floppy, formatted on a PC,
which -booted- MILO fine, but then couldn't be seen from within MILO).
These errors on the floppy occur when I try to just go "fd0", and it begins
to read the disk, shows a bunch of info, but then fails (saying, among other
things, that it could not find MSDOS boot sectors, and giving a bunch of
iso9660 errors...whyever that would be).
-Any- ideas would be much appreciated. I need to use this thing for Apache
with some custom XSSI extensions which I'm only comfortable compiling in
Unix/Linux (trying to rebuild Apache in this fashion which is so common on
unix variants and the like is far too daunting on Win32, and probably
wouldn't work without modification, anyway, even though I do have Visual
Studio...).
Thanks,
Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
3. Install woes with RedHat 6.0 on Alpha XL 266
4. ezppp
5. Redhat 70 on Alpha XL 266 -> succeeded
7. help on alpha xl 266 (alpha proc)
10. Installing RedHat on a DEC Alpha 266-XL
11. Alpha XL 266 slower than a PPro 180??
13. Alpha XL-266 and Matrox Millenium problem