Re: Newbie

[Rodolfo <segleaur@mechanus.org>]

Andrew Lee said something about Newbie on
Sun, 26 Oct 2003 :

| Hi
|
| I have recently ended up owning an Alphaserver 4100 as payment for a debt.
|
| I am familiar with Debian on i386 but have no idea where to start on an
| Alpha.
|
| Could someone point me in the direction of some help (documentation) to get
| me started. The Alpha starts and gives a prompt P00 FIN_D>>> from where you
| can enter commands but the help/man is not that good.
|
| I really need to know how to build the scsi array and how to boot from the
| cd to install debian.
|
| All help no matter how trivial will be appreciated.
|
| Thank you in advance.
|

you might want to check out the docs at http://www.alphalinux.org/docs/ some of
them are a bit dated, but the architecture really hasn't changed that much
(well, until ev7 that is).

what RAID card do you have in the Alpha? is it the DAC960? if so, you have to
upgrade the firmware to 2.7something - i forget exactly, it's been a while.
i've only gotten the ACU utility from compaq to work from the alphabios (though
perhaps someone here has gotten to work SRM).

from there, you should be able to do:

>>>boot <CD_ROM_DEVICE_HERE>

and boot to you CD install, or if you're doing it on a floppy to hit an ftp
server, you'd put your floppy device.

HTH - i haven't done a bootp network install, so i can't help you there.

Cheers,

Rodolfo

--
Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent. -
 Laurence J. Peter