[rescue] Ok, so I went and looked at my Alpha box...

[Ken Hansen]

It is an Alphastation, not Alphaserver (my mistake)...

I don't know what OS I'll run, but your thoughts are appreciated - I did turn up
an interesting note on the video card - seems they have an engineering problem,
one of the three colors in the video connecotr (R, G, or B) is not properly
grounded, bu shorting th egrounds together I will have a very nice stable image
(Thanks Google!) - seems DEC had a custom cable that handled this "problem"...

In a few weeks, when the dust settles, I'll try different OSes on the box - I seem
to recall that the Alphastation 200 was very similar to the Multis, but without th
e"brain-dead" memory access problems that severly limited performance. Also, the
"beefy" 512K cache helps...

Ken

Brian Hechinger wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 07:03:51PM -0400, Ken Hansen wrote:
> >
> >     It is an Alphaserver 200 4/166,
>
> 166Mhz CPU, i think you can just drop in a 266Mhz CPU if you come across one.
>
> >     with 256 Meg RAM,
>
> not bad.
>
> >     some HD (assume it is a 4 Gig Barracuda ?),
>
> hard to say without looking (pull it apart, get on the console?)
>
> >     a CD-ROM drive (Plextor, IIRC),
>
> plextor rules.
>
> >     and a ZLXp-E3 graphics card (refered to as PBXGA-BA/BN) 24 planes, 8
> > MB...
>
> pretty nice card.  don't know how well it's supported by NetBSD though.  the
> only think i could turn up is someone added support to -current for it. no
> acceleration, blah, blah blah, but that was a year ago, so it should work well
> by now i would think.  see NetBSD/alphaserver 200 comment later in this mail.
>
> > Oh, and a dual PCMCIA adapter in a PCI slot ;^)
>
> that seems to have been a very common option in the PCI alphas.  wonder why.
>
> > It looks like a nice box, but I don't know that I ever got it running
> > anything seriously (maybe NT, as it was the easiest install - sorry
> > ;^)...
>
> NT, fooey. :)
>
> > Anyway, I can hear Dave McGuire yelling "Schweet! NetBSD will fly on
>
> Schweet!!  NetBSD will FLY on that box!!!
>
> > that box!", but any other thoughts - is this a decent box, a nice box or
> > a good box? (relative, I suppose, to an SS/5-170 w/TGX, just as a point
> > of reference...)
>
> you options are NetBSD (although i'm not certain that the alphaserver 200 is a
> supported platform, i don't see it on the supported hardware list, but those
> things tend to be wildly out of date) NT, VMS or OSF/1 (or whatever it's called
> this week)
>
> two are unix, one is a PITA to learn if you don't know it already, and one
> sucks.
>
> pick one. :)
>
> -brian
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