Alpha Core Directions

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Great thread, I always like hearing what others do with their Alphas.

I'd just like to throw in my two cents.

> From what i can see the current Alpha Linux users are mainly in two 
> groups:
> 1) A "hobby" set, as you touched on
> 2) a fair amount of people are still running Alpha servers and 
> clusters for scientific computing. they may now be "old" machines, but 
> they still find them useful, and will not retire them anytime soon.

Of course, there's a gray area between these two groups, but I think you 
hit it on the nose. In my case, I use my Alpha (an Alpha XL 366, boots 
with milo, has about 11GB disk and 512MB RAM) as my household server, so 
I'm in both categories (it isn't mission-critical, but it's still a 
server).

The machine is firewall, gateway, and DHCP for 4 other machines, as well 
as FTP and web server for the outside world (the site whose address is 
in my signature). I also use it for some perl work, and sometimes to 
test out some C++ and OpenGL code and make sure it's cross-platform. In 
my coding work, I use Bugzilla which is also installed on that machine, 
and lately it also became my Subversion server as well (I wanted to 
experiment).

I agree that the base installation could be fairly minimal, and we could 
(collectively) set up a yum server to be able to get whatever wasn't 
included. Right now, I use Debian on the machine, but I would like to 
switch to AlphaCore sometime soon, and I admit that it's the package 
system I'll miss most. The fact I can just say "Hey, I'd like to try 
that text editor out" (for example), type apt-get <packagename>, and 
it's installed, will be missed.

Anyways, keep up the good work and happy holidays to everyone!

J-S

-- 
__________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay   jean_seb at videoton.ca
            http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



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