Notes regarding AS200 install

[Martin Lucina <Mato.Lucina@nz.eds.com>]

Hi all,

I am now the pround owner of a DEC AlphaStation 200 4/233. Having been a
fan of debian for years (I use it on my Intel PCs) I decided to install the
frozen release of slink on this box. I must say I was pleased with the
result, the installation was pretty painless.

A few items of note:

- fdisk barfed on the original partition table that was on the disk, I
  think cfdisk did too. It doesn't bother me as I just deleted it but I
  think fdisk/cfdisk in general need some work. 

- I don't like PC partitions. So I used BSD disklabels and discovered that
  the BSD disklabel support in fdisk is slightly broken. Two things, one
  that it would consistently ignore my creating a 'b' partition AFTER I
  created an 'a' partition. This must be a bug, anyway an order of 'b' 'a'
  'd-f' worked fine. Second, when you write a BSD disklabel to disk it does
  not invoke the proper ioctl() to let the kernel know about it, so you
  have to restart fdisk and do a 'w'.

  I would be happy to document this as I imagine other people may have a
  use for using BSD disklabels instead of (yuck) PC partitions. Booting
  using SRM was also no problem, use a

  swriteboot -f3 /dev/sda <path-to-MILO>

- Some pointers would be nice. Like where to get the latest MILO (found
  it, eventually) and where to get firmware from DEC (found that too). All
  the general documentation about Linux-Alpha seems to be old and/or
  out-of-date. I may be able to invest some time in fixing this.

- Kernel 2.2pre7, well this kept me up until 2:30 AM, it seems that kernel
  2.2pre7 hangs at boot (can anyone confirm this?). Anyway, 2.2-pre7-ac4
  worked fine *AFTER* I recompiled with TGA Framebuffer support (this
  should be the default).

- the http method of apt (and apt itself I think) generates heaps of
  unaligned accesses. The boot disks display some error messages (for
  example trying to load NFS as a module when it's in the kernel), others I
  will provide on request (if I can reproduce them).

- fbset segfaults, I debugged it a bit and it seemed to be losing pointers
  all over the place. Weird.

- more documentation. I can't stress this enough. What is especially
  confusing (or would be to a less knowledgable user) is the various
  slightly different/conflicting install guides floating around on the net.
  I should probably write to the alphalinux.org webmaster about this.

That's all I can think of for now. I'm happy to help
porting/building/debugging stuff as time allows. 

Thanks for the good work.

Martin