Alphastation

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

I have an alphastation 500/400 (ex-VMS) with 128 MB and 4 GB disk and a cd-player and diskette drive.

I would like to install Linux, by preference Debian.

I would like to do this via diskette + HTTP (server is VMS server on INTRAnet, no internet access but files can be copied from internet to intranet).

Is is not clear which files/flavors I must place on the boot diskette and how to use the HTTP part.

Anyone did something alike ? And how ?

Wim

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Correction : 2 GB disk.

[Kris Clippeleyr]

Wim,

Although floppies are not mentioned, take a look at
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/alpha/install
or
http://mirrors.sec.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/debian/debian-archive/dists/Debian-2.1/main/disks-alpha/current/ch-welcome.html

Hope this helps,

Kris (aka Qkcl)

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Yes Kris, I already found and read that.
But the flavor you can download is Jensen and as far as I now, I need alcor or xlt-alcor.

Wim

[Huc_1]

You have probaly read this by now, but i found this bit about floppy install in the debian doc

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/alpha/ch-rescue-boot.en.html#s-install-cd

I run RH 7.2 on a Personel Station 500a, and wanted to switch/try a Debian woody onto it

I had installed a previous version of RH and update to 7.2 so it as been a long while since I did the initial install, but I read on the above link that you could do this by network boot then nfs install the rest... "I still have to check if my network card will allow this", perhaps this is also an option for you ?

keep us informed of findings/progress

Jean-Pierre Huc

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

I got it working !

I used a VMS machine and enabled bootp and tftp. I setup bootp for the 500 with the image TFTPBOOT.IMG and an IP address ...

I did boot ewa0 on the 500 ...
I got a menu driver to partition the disk and do the basic setup.
I told it to use HTTP to get the kernel install kits. If you have internet access this would go directly to debian but because I used a VMS http server I needed all files.

I found a tar file with all files I needed but they were not in the correct directory. Also a lot of names were not directly VMS compatible (many points, to long). So I had to do some tricks is WASD to remap them. Many files in the tar file were not the right version and I had to download them 1 by 1.

But finally the kernel got installed but the boot failed (something about invalid compression). May be I read to fast but the correct boot command is something like

boot dka0 -file vmlinuz -flags root=/dev/sda1