Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 20:43:15 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: sprice@hiwaay.net (Steve Price) Cc: alpha@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: need an Alpha-based machine Message-ID: <199711172043.NAA26135@usr07.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.96.971116143402.12578D-100000@fly.HiWAAY.net> from "Steve Price" at Nov 16, 97 02:44:29 pm
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> Does anybody out there in FreeBSD-land have a spare > Alpha-based machine that they would be willing to > loan/sell? > > I want to contribute to getting the FreeBSD Alpha > port going. I'm not (yet) much of a kernel hacker, > but I have been going through NetBSD's Alpha tree > trying to shoehorn it into our tree. > > Yes, I know that pilfering NetBSD's tree may not be > the right way to go about it, but at least it will > give us a reference implementation within our four > walls that we can play around with. I've been taking the same approach, with time out for my move, so I haven't really done anything recently. I'm using a Multia, and not the "official" porting platform (there is no documentation for the "official" platform). You can obtain a Multia rather cheaply from www.onsale.com, if you are willing to wait for the interest to wane (it gets bumped by postings like this one -- might as well not compete with other FreeBSD'ers. ;-)). I got mine for less that $400. If you have a PS/2 keyboard (it came with a mouse) and a VGA monitor and 32M or so of memory, and an external SCSI disk (all lying around, at my place), then you can have a working Alpha pretty cheaply. Actually, I use an external JAZZ drive and switch it between my Alpha, my HP300, and a PPC603 (Motorola PowerStack system). You might want to consider the new Syquest, or the the newer Syquest that is either out (or will be in a few days/weeks) that is to compete with the 2G JAZZ. I have a problem with My JAZZ drive in that you can't install NT or Windows 95 on the things unless you have an Adaptec SCSI controller and tell the BIOS to pretend it's a fixed disk (the NT/95 removable media driver corrupts data paged in from a removable device), so I would recommend the Syquest (this is based on a manufacturer rep claiming you can install NT/95 on their drive without the same problem, so the claim may not be valid). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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