[SunRescue] Nice little rescue at the swap today (alphastation -- OS suggestions?)

[Robert Novak]

Hi all,

I rescued a "mystery" machine at a swap meet Sunday morning. THe guy
selling it wasn't sure what it was or if it worked, but I recognized and
understood the "Alphastation 250 4/266" on the front panel and the four
big simms inside. 

Turns out it is actually a 266MHz Alphastation 250 with 256MB of memory,
2GB of disk, 8bit video card, cdrom, and Windows NT 4.0 workstation. Turns
out it works too. Oh, and it's a heck of a lot lighter than the
Alphaserver 600. :-)  Not a bad $50 gamble!

Anyway, I'm looking for suggestions on an OS to run on this. It has
Windows NT but I don't have passwords for it. I would've had OpenBSD 2.8
on it already if Alpha were on the CD. Since I'll have to download
whatever I use anyway, I'm leaning toward FreeBSD or Debian Linux (maybe
dual-boot with non-commercial Tru64). 

Any suggestions or caveats?

--ROb

-- 
Robert Novak, Indyramp Consulting * rnovak at indyramp.com * indyramp.com/~rnovak
        "And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
           Maybe this year will be better than the last...." -- counting crows