On Sunday 22 June 2003 03:55 pm, bob smith wrote:
I am looking for some advise or hints if you guys are willing
to advise. I have not been able to piece together all the bits
I need to determine what version and pieces I should run to
do:
1) Desktop box that will allow me to do surfing, docs that are
compatible with word (rtf is fine), some gimp stuff, some
audio ripping and conversion. I have a couple of 250/4 266
boxes I want to do this with. I keep looking at KDE and gnome
for this.
No problem here--RTF is universally compatible, and even
command-line tools like docbook-utils can create RTF files.
Gimp runs OK on Alpha (as much as I've run it), and so does KDE.
Don't know about gnome and audio ripping/encoding.
2) web server wtih php/mysql, webmail. I have a 164LX box I
want to use to do this. but I could use a 3000 box I have -
that would be my choice, cause I want to...
Again, not too much problem. Apache and MySQL both run just fine
on Alpha. PHP 4.3.2 runs fine too; earlier versions also do
fine if you just build them without the pear components. I
don't know too much about webmail, but I suspect SquirrelMail is
also pretty platform-agnostic.
3) put together a beowulf or beowulf-like cluster using 5
164LX boxes and 2 DS10 boxes.
Beowulf might be the thing to use here. From what I've heard,
OpenMOSIX isn't quite alpha-ready yet. I could be wrong about
that tho.
4) Server for compiling and kernel building, app building, I
havea 164lx/600 with a gig and lots of disk for this.
Ditto here--164LX/600MHz with...well, 512MB. But 512MB is
generally enough if all you're doing is compile jobs on a
uniprocessor box.
I have most of my machines running netbsd now, but I am not
able to get KDE to really build right even on some of the vga
cards that are supposed to be supported.
Recent XFree86+Radeon 7500 PCI works pretty well on Linux-Alpha.
You even get some decent 3D acceleration.
I would like to have all the boxes or most of the boxes running
the same os, and am willing to convert to linux if I can get
the right one that supports Alpha. Debian has been solid for a
good while on one of my boxes. I just got a new to me machine,
dual cpu 1000 running redhat. The gnome and kde stuff run fine
on this box.
Between Debian and RedHat, I personally would choose Debian.
Debian is pretty committed to keeping their Alpha branch pretty
well in sync with their x86 branch, unlike RedHat and SuSE.
RedHat/SuSE are pretty much just turning the Linux-Alpha project
over to those employees who want to work on it in their free
time, and saying "here, go nuts if you want."