Hoping there's an alpha guru here who will share a little time.
I have been attempting to get debian working on an alphaserver
Compaq ES40. It has a scsi controller, 35Gig (aprx.) scsi hard
drive, cd, fdd, Ethernet, Elsa Gloria Video, 4 500MHz CPU's, 4 gigs
of ram, and I'm using a flatscreen (T.V) monitor via a vga cable.
At first I couldn't get the cd to work at all (even though I
checked MD5 and burned at 1X). Then I upgraded my SRM to 7.?
(whatever the most recent one was).
The I was able to get the cd to boot to aboot.
I have installed twice using this netinstall cd, and everything
appears to go well until it tries to start x, both times fail to
start xserver. (no screens found).
The second time I used aptitude to get KDE, but it seems to act the
same as Gnome.
I have tried dpkg-update xserver-xorg and manually chosen from the
seemingly few video card choices and tried several variations.
My card is a PCI Elsa Gloria.
I also tried getting the PCI address and putting that in manually,
but it didn't help either.
Not sure if it matters but...
After I updated SRM, I've tried to access the alphabios
unsuccessfully, it just hangs forever after displaying message that
it's loading alphabios. My understanding is that I don't need that
anyways, but thought I'd mention the odd behaviour in case it means
something.
I loaded Centos and it ran great, except I couldn't seem to find
any good software repository for it. Since I'm using the alpha as a
desktop, I wanted Office programs etc.
I don't have a way to use a serial console instead of vga, so not
sure how to get any printouts of screen output into this message.
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.