DIGITAL

ALPHA AXP Linux!

Since a friend of mine (Michael Engel) and me have a DEC AlphaPC, namely the old Jensen (150Mhz Alpha, EISA bus), we are collecting all kinds of useful stuff, programs and docs on our ftp server. Along with some misc stuff, you can find the BLADE distribution and parts of RedHat there. Michael and me use the following setup: Currently we run Linux perfectly well on both of the machines, including complete development system, X11 and ethernet support.

So far I have to say, Linux is very stable and runs very smoothly. I used "out-of-the-box" kernels 1.3.8* selfhosting on my machine and had no trouble since; actually I run 2.0.31.

Jensen specials

The Jensen architecture has become obsolete in the Alpha world since DEC changed from EISA to PCI bus. But the old Jensen is, and hopefully will be, fully supported. The installation is some more complex than on the other machines because the Jensen firmware cannot boot Linux from floppy. But David Paradis has written two very handy utilities to compensate this.
You can find all those special files on our FTP server in the JENSEN-INSTALL directory. Concerning X11 the only choice is to use the latest Alpha XFree with the ELSA Winner 1000 ISA/EISA card. Since the Jensen is different no other SVGA cards are, and perhaps will be, supported. Even the original Digital card that came with the first Jensens, the Compaq QVision, is not supported at all. Only problem I had so far is that the standard "vanilla" kernels have an Alpha spcific bug so that System V IPC does not work which also means that the X11 shared memory extensions do not work. By applying the alpha-kernel-diffs this bug can be corrected and SHM works again! This is especially useful for programs that do heavy graphics output like some games, mpeg-play or for example xaos.
If you have problems installing ALPHA-Linux on your Jensen I'd be glad to help! Just send me a short problem discription by email and I'll try.

22. May 1996: Kernel Pre 2.07

Compiled out of the box and runs fine.

23. May 1996: Firmware update

Last night I did a firmware upgrade on my Jensen from V1.0 to V1.7 There are roumors that after V1.7 the ELSA Winner 1000 SVGA board could cause some trouble. You can find Firmware V1.7 on our FTP server. The update itself was rather easy.
Just copy all contained files to a single floppy disk, insert it, choose "Upgrade firmware" from the NT boot console and off you go. Just follow the instructions on the screen and everything will work out fine. But before doing above steps write down your EISA setup! It will be erased during the upgrade and you will have to enter everything again. The two support programs "savenv.exe" and "restorenv.exe" did not restore the EISA config on my Jensen.

25. June 1996: Aztech removed

After experiencing heavy problems with the Aztech CDROM on a Mitsumi controller card (grmpf...) I removed the double-speed drive again and replaced it with the old Mitsumi LU005. The kernel I now use is the official V2.0 which works fine!

25. July 1996: New Kernel, new X server

Just installed kernel 2.0.10, worked out-of-the-box (ootb ?). Installed new X server too, seems better now! Virtual console switch from X to text and vice versa works now, other glitches gone too.

25. August 1996: More RAM, new kernel

First of all more RAM was needed and now added! I can really recommend 32MB RAM for Linux AXP. Now I'm able to recompile the kernel and have X11 running at the same time :) Kernel is now 2.0.14 and is doing it's job.

11. November 1996

After successfully updating my Jensen to RedHat 4.0 my Jensen now runs completely ELF and the new XFree 3.2. I can tell you, dynamically linked binaries are much smaller! The more packages I installed the more free diskspace I had :)) Really funny! I'm using right now the ELF glibc from RedHat and am currently looking out for a new one.
Updating to ELF had one problem BTW: After I had installed all packages nothing seemed to compile anymore due to missing headerfiles! The solution was simple. The new ELF glibs uses other kernel headers than the ones that come with the standard kernel up to 2.0.24. To solve this I installed the kernel header package from RedHat into a directory /usr/src/linux2.0.18 and set the links in /usr/include/ correspondingly.

29. April 1997

Uhh ... it's been a long time since I updates this page ;)
Currently I still run RedHat 4.0 with some updated packages. I also "robbed" the streamer and CDROM from my Jensen because I needed them somewhere else (in fact in my server). The header files of 2.0.30 seem to be correct now for glibc. So one can use vanilla kernel sources and compile and use them on the Alpha.

21. October 1997

Geeezzzz! The long waiting is over and kernel 2.0.31 is finally out now! It works OK but still has the above mentiones SYS-V IPC bug. The 2.0.30 alpha-diffs can be applied though and IPC works again (along with the X11 SHM). I also use my new 640MB (in fact 605MB) MO (magneto optical) drive with my Jensen. Be aware that for this MO drive a kernel patch is needed so that it can work with 2048 bytes per sector.
Apart from this I am currently collecting emulators for my Alpha ;) Currenly I have running: Does anyone know more?

9. December 1997

After thinking about an upgrade I finally did it and updated first to RedHat Mustang and now to RedHat V5.0. On the first glance everything works OK but the new libg++ and libstdc++ seem buggy and all program linked with it seem to core right at startup ;( I hope that upgrades will soon be available. I also tried to install a brand new harddisk on my Jensen and nearly failed ;) Here is a small How-To on how it worked for me.

9. December 1997

DOOM is here!
OK, it's not the most important thing on earth, but surely the second ;) I have put patch and binaries on our ftp server. You may also want to look at my little Alpha games page.