Re: updating firmware, installing gentoo on alpha, etc.

"Marnix Arnold" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.gentoo.alpha
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi Alex,

[...]
> - I'd like mess around with xorg on alpha.  I'm running srm 6.7-2 and
> it won't post my pci radeon rv250, so for the time being I have an old
> s3 virge in there.  does anyone have any experience with the newer srm
> (7.2) and radeon cards?  I've heard arc/alphabios is better at posting
> video cards.  Is there any truth to that?  Also I seem to recall
> having read somewhere that milo or aboot will also post video cards if
> srm can't.  Is this true?

I have an XLT-300 which only has Alphabios (no SRM). So far I have used it
only with an S3 768 card and a Matrox Millenium II, both worked fine, but
only if I seated the card in the first PCI slot. I have no experience with
newer video cards.

From what I've read, people who have the choice generally prefer to use
SRM, since Milo (the Alphabios boot loader) is not very well supported
anymore. I had a very hard time finding a Milo that would boot 2.4 kernels
on my XLT. I haven't been able to boot kernels above 2.4.21
(alpha-sources) at all on my XLT, even though they compile just fine.

> - stage 1/2 vs 3.  have much of an improvement can I expect with ev5
> binaries vs ev4?  is it worth the extra time to do a stage 1/2 build?

If I were you, I'd go for a stage 3 installation first, you can always
redo the installation after you've played with it for a while and are
confident that everything works. I did a stage 1 myself, it took many
hours...

I don't know how much improvement you'll get with ev5 over ev4. If you are
keen to get the most out of your alpha and feel adventurous, use CCC
(Compaq C Compiler):
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-alpha-compaq-tools.xml

> - how is 2.6.x kernel support on alpha?

The gentoo-dev-sources and development-sources ebuilds are marked ~alpha:
http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=gentoo-dev-sources
http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=development-sources

Unfortunately, my XLT refuses to boot any of those kernels...

Marnix.


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