Re: congratulations in order
On Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 04:15:17PM -0600, Skye wrote:
> Congrats! Can you tell us how you got to that point? I need to bring up a
> series of servers next week and dreading my ignorance. They are currently
> running an old release of Red Hat.
Short answer: up-to-date Debian "sid" (unstable) on a PWS 433au with
a kernel built from the latest kernel.org source tree.
Longer answer: your mileage *will* vary, depending on your hardware.
The hardest part of "getting to that point" is going to be bootstrapping
from nothing. The debian-alpha archives have *many* postings that will
attest to that :-(. I probably missed it, but we might have an install
CD at this point that includes enough of the needed drivers to
accomplish an installation. If not, the known traditional trouble spots
are video and disk controller support. If you clear that hurdle,
successfully partitioning hard disks on alpha is more difficult than it
should be, and depends entirely on what tool you choose: recent "fdisk"
versions on alpha are broken -- see the debian-alpha archives for
workarounds.
If all else fails, you can try either the last official Debian release
for alpha, or maybe a Gentoo boot CD. I would encourage you to try the
latest Debian CD though... and document here exactly what doesn't work
so there's a chance of getting it fixed. Upgrading from the ancient
Debian stable release *will* be problematic, and I can't really
recommend that option.
--Bob
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