[CLUE-Tech] Re: X on AlphaStation [WAS Debian install on alpha.]

[Dave Anselmi]

rrarabie at attbi.com wrote:

> > > Sean LeBlanc wrote:
>
> >I'm also trying to get X 4.0 going, which
> > is proving interesting. In the meantime, I'm trying out 3.x, to see if that
> > works at all. Did you bother setting up X in Debian, or did you think the
> > lack of disk space made it a bad idea?
>
> I believe NetBSD is the only *NIX that supports the graphics cards shipped with Alphastation 255.  The doco on Compaq's  retired hardware site (http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/workstations/retired/a255series.html) indicates that these all should have a PowerStorm 3D10, 3D30, or 4D20 card.
>
> AFAIK, none of those are supported by any Linux for Alpha distro, and in the BSD world, only by NetBSD.

I haven't tried X yet.  I think I have space for it, and will try it shortly.  Of course I rarely get X to work using a distro, so debian may give me fits.

Xfree86 4.1.0 says it supports alpha graphics card with the tga driver.  I've seen our cards called 'tga' somewhere, so I think it will work.  The diff between debian x86 and alpha didn't list X, so I assume it's available.  Even if FreeBSD doesn't have X for alpha, I'm sure you could build it
yourself.

I'd like to upgrade from woody's 2.2.19 kernel, but I haven't found any 2.4 kernel packages yet.  Even if I do, 2.4.16 isn't available yet.  So I might be compiling my own and trying to figure out debian's packaging to install it.  I did a quick config to see how long a kernel compile would
take.  Didn't let it finish, but it seemed like a long time.  I'll do a benchmark against my Athlon eventually.

Dave