Alpha Core ISO Images

[Mike Barnes]

ftp://ftp.maths.monash.edu.au/pub/alphacore/

Mirrors, please. I'll have a web site up fairly soon to provide a
central repository for links and information.

Release Notes
=============
This is an interim release, intended to provide a development base for
future builds. It's a fairly stable system, but has a lot of rough
edges. Please do not install it if you need your Alpha for anything
important.

Installation
============
Install is via CD only (both graphical and text-mode installs tested).
NFS or FTP installs will probably work, but you'll need at least CD 1
to boot from.

Rainy Weekend Project Idea #1: create a netbootable kernel/ramdisk
image and share it with your friends!

The main thing that's not quite right is the partitioning stage. This
is best done via fdisk from a command prompt. There'll be a prompt
sitting on virtual console #2 by the time you get to that stage.
You'll need to use a BSD disklabel partitioning scheme, and start your
first partition a couple of cylinders in to leave room for the
bootloader. Create at least a root partition and some swap space, set
the partition types to ext2/swap as appropriate and then pop back to
the installer and use Disk Druid to assign the mount points for your
new partitions.

After that, the install should proceed happily. There's a moment at
the very end where the installer seems to hang at 50% of "Performing
Post-install Configuration", but it will pick up and carry on
eventually. Just leave it be.

Supported Hardware
==================
So far, this build has been installed and run on the following systems:
* AlphaServer DS10
* AlphaStation 200
* PWS 433a
* Generic 164LX board

No SMP systems have been tested so far, to my knowledge.

Older graphics cards seem to not fare very well with the newer X
servers. I've had the most success with PCI Radeon cards, and the
Matrox line still seems to kick on as well as ever. YMMV.

Source Availability
===================
Due to disk space constraints, there are no SRPM CD images. The
"official" SRPM tree is fairly scattered, too. This will be finalised
and generally kept in something resembling order for future builds.
95% of the packages are straight recompiles of the Fedora Core 2
release and update SRPMs for i386, and are available at your local
mirror.

Sources for modified packages can be found in various points of the
"Carmen" tree at:
ftp://ftp.maths.monash.edu.au/pub/carmen

If you want something specific and can't find it, mail me and I'll
make sure it gets uploaded to a prominent place. I'm feeling very
guilty about not having kept track of my build sources during this
project, and it'll be better managed in the future.

Upgrades
========
Upgrades from previous Red Hat releases for the Alpha are not
supported right now, but this is a target for future builds of the
system. Upgrading from the "Carmen" tree should be easy as this system
is almost identical. I'd suggest popping all the files somewhere
accessible and getting "yum" to do the hard work for you.

Rainy Weekend Project Idea #2: Unpack the contents of the ISO images
onto your large file server with a fast connection to the net and run
"yum-arch" in Fedora/RPMS! Post the URL to this mailing list!

Miscellaneous
=============
Thanks are due to a great many people for making this possible -
especially Cristian Balint. Without Cristian's work on glibc, I would
have hit a dead end months ago and would have given up by now. To
everyone on this list who has provided patches, tested dodgy packages,
and provided feedback and (most importantly) encouragement - thank you
all as well.

Finally, thanks to everyone contributing directly and indirectly to
the Fedora project. A lot of hard work is going on over there, and
it's showing.

I'm going to stop and post this before I really start sounding like
I'm hosting an awards show. There's a new toy out - go and play with
it. :)