Steve Langasek said the following:
I'm pleased to report that daily debian-installer images for sarge/alpha are again available. You can download both bootable businesscard and netinst CD images from <http://people.debian.org/~manty/testing/netinst/alpha/daily/>. As of the 03-Jan-2004 build, there are several known problems with the images, as detailed at <http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/debian-boot-200401/msg00198.html>. Today's build should clear up two of these problems, first so that aboot can boot the kernel without twiddling the kernel options, and second so that the installer language defaults can be pulled in from the SRM environment. This fixed image should be available for download some time after midnight UTC.
No one mentioned any specifics on the hang when the qlogicisp driver was loaded, if it's the same problem I'm having I believe it's because the driver gets confused when nothing is on channel 0 id 0. I have one of those cards, but all the devices (2 hard disks) are on channel 1 and when I load the driver all it does is sit in 'initializing' state and prints "scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 0, scsi0, channel0, id 0, lun 0, Inquiry 00 00 00 ff 00" over and ever about once per second. I don't know if this is a problem with the SCSI subsystem or the qlogicisp driver itself.
I also believe the problem first started in 2.4.20 and I have a 2.4.23 kernel that works fine, so I figured it was found and fixed. The 2.4.23 kernel I'm using is built from a kernel.org tree and not from a Debian kernel-source package, and I'm 99% sure I didn't apply any patches to get it to work (I could be wrong, it's been a while since I did it). So either 2.4.24 has a qlogicisp/SCSI regression or I did apply a patch to my copy of 2.4.23. It also appears that 2.6.0 works fine (haven't tried anything newer).
FYI I was installing the on20040128 build on a Miata PWS600au with a QLogic ISP1040 (according to SRM 'show con'), if you need more specific information I can get it.
I think we have a good shot at getting alpha included in the second debian-installer beta, but we'll need to see some successful install reports over the next week or so for it to even be considered. Unfortunately, my own attempt at installing failed, but it may be a hardware-specific failure; so if anybody is able to install a complete system from this image, please let the debian-boot list know. This image is still an SRM-only image. There is no MILO support at all, and AFAIK no work being done on it, either. If anyone cares about being able to install sarge on an AlphaBIOS-using system, now may be the time to get involved in d-i development. Cheers,
> -- > Steve Langasek > postmodern programmer Jim.