[rescue] Appropriate OS for Alpha?

[Tim H.]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 13:28:07 -0400
Chris Petersen <havoc at apk.net> 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

Well, NetBSD is the last of the three (Free, Open, Net) BSDs that I have
played with.  

Free looked nice until I started attempting to get the sources for the
ports tree, because the ports tree points at files all over the @!#$
internet, which made it a real PITA to download all I needed for a
package and bring it home and install it, always had some stupid
dependency that was 20M+ that I didn't get and had to wait half a day to
dowenload on my dial up.

I have OpenBSD x86 on my gonna be new firewall, I like the fact that the
ports tree distfiles are all at ftp.openbsd.org.  However, for the Alpha
OPenBSD took a hiatus, and is currently without a maintainer, and just
looked a little sketchy.

NetBSD is currently on the AlphaServer that started this thread, right
now I handed it the nastiest dependency mess I know of, which is putting
Eterm on a machine without previously putting on any dependancies, and
it seems to be chugging right along.  I have the whole package distfile
collection, and a matching pkgsrc tree, and so far I am very happy with
the package system and the dependancy handling.  The only glitch I have
had so far is with libtool, for some reason it failed to extract
completely, and so it blew up when it tried to patch files it hadn't
extracted.  I manually extracted it and it breezed right through.

Do have one question, I put bash on, and I would like it to be my
default shell, so I changed the shell for my account in /etc/passwd, but
it still launches csh.  Bash works fine, I can run it manually, but
where do I need to change this?

So far I have Apache, PHP, MySQL, Samba, --hang on, Eterm just got done
compiling-- haven't done anything with them yet, but it was smooth. 
Definitely beats the slackware install :-) Oh yeah, and I put pico on
there too.

So for the general agreement that NetBSD was a good way to go, thanks.

Tim