Hi all, Thanks go to Joe Fletcher, Andy Walden, Lew Randerson , Andrew
Brennan , Niels Roetert , Matthias Toussaint , Dr. Tom Blinn and Eric
Gatenby.Original question is below, Eric sent me everything I would write
on the summary , here it is:
From: Eric Gatenby <egatenby_at_mailhub.com>
To: Mirat Satoglu <mirat_at_bornova.ege.edu.tr>
Subject: Re: operating systems for alpha
Hi. The DEC 3000 series are TurboChannel bus based, not PCI bus based
systems. Because of this ONLY these operating systems will work on them:
Digital UNIX/OSF/Tru64
OpenVMS/Alpha
FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD will work, but they do not support any
TurboChannel expansion cards or the onboard graphics cards. You have to use
a serial/dumb-terminal console to use these operating systems.
Linux will NOT work on these. Last I checked, there are no plans to port
Linux to TurboChannel based Alphas. Linux ONLY works on PCI basd Alphas.
HTH
--Eric
I checked some linux sites including redhat and suse, and they r not
available for dec 3000 s because of TurboChannel . Here is a paragraph
from www.alphalinux.org faqs :
5.1 Unsupported Systems
Linux/Alpha is unlikely to support the TURBOchannel-based Alpha systems in
the near (or any) future (this is the DEC 3000
series of workstations). The reason for this is two-fold: first, these
machines have an I/O system that is very different from
PCI-based machines and therefore do not look anything like PCs (e.g.,
pretty much all drivers would have to be written from
scratch). Second, with the advent of PCI, the TURBOchannel is pretty much
dead technology (for better or worse) and it just
isn't all that much fun to develop software for dead technology (on the
other hand, it may soon be possible to buy such systems
cheaply, which would make them more interesting to Linux users, I
suppose).
If you have such a machine and want to run a free OS, look for the *BSD's.
At least one of them supports the 3000 series. -end
So, I checked freebsd, netbsd and openbsd sites, and wrt my
investigations:
netbsd supports dec 3000/500 family systems + dec 3000/500 family,
openbsd supports (from their site):
Supported Hardware:
DEC 3000/[3456789]00 series with the following peripherals:
Supported hardware:
Built-in serial ports.
Built-in LANCE ethernet.
Built-in SCSI chips (53c[f]94), though both may not work at
the same time.
Things that may work but haven't been tested:
TurboChannel option slot LANCE (PMAD-A).
Things are *not* supported at this time:
Frame buffers of any type.
Other TurboChannel option boards.
The ISDN/Audio chip
One last word:
Windows NT does not support DEC 3000s because of TurboChannel ...
Thx...
Mehmet Mirat Satoglu
On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Mirat Satoglu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to learn which operating systems are available for dec 3000
> systems ? As far as I know, except from dunix, freebsd and redhat is
> available, true, what else?
>
> Mehmet Mirat Satoglu
>
>
>
Received on Thu Jul 22 1999 - 16:41:30 NZST