[rescue] Appropriate OS for Alpha?

[Chris Petersen]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 01:56:30PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On July 22, Chris Petersen wrote:
> > As for NetBSD, I never really have played much with it.  A couple of us
> > tried to get NetBSD (forget rev) up and running on pmaxes back in '97, and
> > it was so ugly, I guess I kind of shut that part of my brain off for a bit
> 
>   Huh?  What was ugly about it?
> 
>      -Dave
> 

It's been a *long* time, granted, but I seem to remember:

- borken netbooting
- missing devices at that point (framebuffers?  not sure)
- poor documentation on the netboot process
- inability to actually setup a bootblock on the disk after netbooting

I think they ended up getting it to work finally by using another DECstation
running Ultrix to disklabel the drive, a Sun and that same Ultrix box in
combination to netboot, and having to access it via telnet (no console
support of any type at the time).  This was 1996, now that I think about it. 
It was an amazing amount of effort to go to to avoid Ultrix.  Not that it
wasn't worthwhile...This was kind of like jumping through 2 flaming hoops
perpendicular to each other while holding marshmallow tongs trying to roast
some smores wearing a full body cast...You know, that same effort you go
through anytime you try to get a Microsoft product to work in an unapproved,
I mean, standard fashion...

I know in '98 we tried to donate various bits of hardware to help with the
continued migration & stability of the port.  I actually tracked down and
bought like 6 of the only really well supported framebuffer (a PMAG-B, I
think) to replace the PMAG-Ds & PMAG-Fs we had.  We donated some of those to
somebody, don't recall who...

Later on, back in 2000, we donated some 3000/600s and more DECstation stuff
to a couple of guys in Columbus who were working on NetBSD stuff.  Never did
hear what came of that...

Chris

-- 
Chris Petersen			  E-mail: havoc at apk.net
Systems Engineer, ExperTeam Services, EDS PLM Solutions