Luke Seubert (lseubert@Radix.Net) wrote: > Good day all, hello; > I am presently running Debian on my Celeron home computer, but would > like to experiment with a 21164 based Alpha workstation. Any advice > from the Debian Alpha community would be much appreciated. Sure... > Packages: Having researched Paul Slootman's Alpha/i386 diffs page ( > http://auric.debian.org/~paul/alpha/diff/ ), it seems that the stable > potato release of Alpha had roughly 116 fewer packages than the i396 > release. This seems pretty good overall. Does Debian Alpha usually > keep up with the i386 packages this well? Are there any major packages > missing from the Alpha distro? Yes. Some of those packages are i386 specific and a few will not compile (for one reason or another) on Alpha. > Compiling: My understanding is that the compiler released by Digital > for use with Linux does a much better job of compiling than the standard > GCC compiler - resulting in much faster code. Are the binaries compiled > for the Debian Alpha distribution made using the Digital compiler, or GCC? CCC (Compaq C Compiler) does do a better job at most things vs GCC. Packages are made using GCC. CCC is non-free (but still very cool). > Desktop practicality: Since this would be a home computer, the Debian > Alpha system would mostly be used for web browsing, email, word > processing, playing CDs, etc. No game playing though. While I know > that Alphas are superb scientific and engineering workstations, how well > do they manage in this sort of home user role? I use mine for this daily, I couldn't imagine doing it on another platform... Although for Netscape (pre6.0 stuff) you have to use the Tru64 UNIX bins + libs. Which is non-free, but works great! (see my old, old, old articles on alphalinux.org) HTH, Ron -- Email: <mailto:rbf@farrer.net>, <mailto:rbf@debian.org> Home: <http://www.farrer.net/~rbf/>
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