Re: congratulations in order

On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 08:44:01AM -0500, Bob Tracy wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 04:15:17PM -0600, Skye wrote:
> > Congrats!  Can you tell us how you got to that point?  I need to bring up a
> > series of servers next week and dreading my ignorance.  They are currently
> > running an old release of Red Hat.
> 
> Short answer: up-to-date Debian "sid" (unstable) on a PWS 433au with
> a kernel built from the latest kernel.org source tree.
> 
> Longer answer: your mileage *will* vary, depending on your hardware.
> 
> The hardest part of "getting to that point" is going to be bootstrapping
> from nothing.  The debian-alpha archives have *many* postings that will
> attest to that :-(.  I probably missed it, but we might have an install
> CD at this point that includes enough of the needed drivers to
> accomplish an installation.

The generic kernel has been fixed.  The install CD should work except
if you need non-free firmware such as the qlogic firmware.  If you have
USB that gives a way of supplying the firmware to the installer.

> If not, the known traditional trouble spots
> are video and disk controller support.  

You can always install by serial port and bring up the video later.
In particular, if you have a radeon card you will need to build your
own kernel with an inbuilt radeon driver to bring up full video.

> If you clear that hurdle,
> successfully partitioning hard disks on alpha is more difficult than it
> should be, and depends entirely on what tool you choose: recent "fdisk"
> versions on alpha are broken -- see the debian-alpha archives for
> workarounds.

Use parted.  I believe the install disk now uses that.

Cheers,
Michael.