Install of AC2 on UP1000 & CS20

[Stig Telfer]

Finally I had some time to tinker with AlphaCore on a couple of old  
boards.  I picked up an API CS20 (Tsunami/Shark), and a UP1000  
(Nautilus).  I put AlphaCore 2.0 on them both.

The UP1000 was straightforward.  It had a clean install and  
everything appeared to go to plan.  As an encore it even dual boots  
with OpenBSD.

The CS20 I tried to upgrade from a much-hacked RH7-era install, and  
that didn't go well at all.  The upgrade process produced an  
unbootable system.  Around the initrd/rootfs stage the 2.6 kernel  
would panic.  I managed to recover the system by finding one of my  
old 2.4 kernels and getting the board up into single user mode.

Since the system was now in a very dodgy state I chose a clean  
reinstall, but not quite clean because I asked it not to reformat  
the /home, /var and /opt partitions.  The only apparent problem this  
caused during the install was that /var holds the RPM database, and  
some of the RPMs of the original system claimed to be still installed  
at the end of the process.  Many of the AC2 packages also claimed to  
be installed but no files were present on the disk.  I patched that  
up and now the system is running well.

The only other package problem I had was that cyrus-imapd was linked  
with an older revision of db library.  For some reason RPM didn't  
notice this.  I rebuilt a cyrus-imapd package from source and now  
everything is good.

There is still a hell of a lot of Alpha specific knowledge needed to  
get these systems set up, but when was the Alpha ever the easy option?

I want to thank everyone who put so much effort into packaging and  
testing this distro - great work!  What kind of help is needed for AC3?

Stig