Alpha Core Directions

[William H. Magill]

On 21 Dec, 2004, at 11:51, Dialup Jon Norstog wrote:
> The thing that nees the most work IMO, is the installer.  It is really 
> not at
> all clear about formatting a disk so it will boot from SRM.  That goes 
> for
> both the text and the graphical installers.

I have to agree here -- I just acquired an XP1000 (EV6.7) which had been
running FreeBSD.

I tried installing the RH 7.1 Alpha distribution I got from Compaq...
Never succeeded UNTIL I used the "jump-start" cd to format the disk 
first.
Then the install went O.K.

The biggest "problem" besides the fact that the RH installer apparently
won't overwrite the BSD labels is that of defining partition sizes.

I haven't made an extensive search, but finding "recommendations" for
appropriate disk layouts has not been fruitful.

It would be quite useful to find some recommendations for the various
Compaq disks ... especially for defining the swap space when you have
750 meg or 1gig of main memory.

If I remember correctly, the RH manual for Alpha describes how to set 
the
SRM boot params to boot from the disk -- I know them from Tru64, so I
didn't pay much attention to them.

I know the FreeBSD docs make a point about NOT setting the auto_reboot
parameter UNLESS you have a halt button. (Without a halt button, getting
to the SRM from power-up is almost impossible. You have to boot the box
and then halt it.)

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg
# Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg
# PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]-Tru64 5.1a
# XP1000  [Alpha 21264-3 (EV6) - 256 meg] FreeBSD
# XP1000  [Alpha 21264-A (EV 6.7) - 384 meg] RH 7.1
magill at mcgillsociety.org
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