ALPHA 21164 Workstation
Jeffrey Watts
watts at jayhawks.net
Sun Mar 5 12:13:33 CST 2000
On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Mike McVey wrote:
> This system is a good 3-4 years old. What might it be worth? How would
> it stack up verses both a 400 dollar, "state of the art" Celeron 400
> MHz EMachine with equal RAM or even a decent, brand new, consumer
> grade 550 MHz Pentium III?
The Celeron and PIII would kick it's hiney (maybe by almost a factor of
two) in almost anything. It's still a very nice system, though.
> Any known problems with using this system for linux? I understand that
> for both NT and Linux, applications are processor independent, and
> thus software written for either OS that runs on x86 systems will work
> on the Alpha too? But will Windows 98 Win32 applications work on an
> Alpha NT box?
Yes and no. Some Unix apps are poorly written, and will misbehave on a
64-bit system like the Alpha. Most will work great, though. For a reason
why, look up "cast"ing, pointers, and long integers.
> What about drivers? Perhaps these will be hardware specific and thus I
> am at the mercy of the likely far smaller linux for alpha driver
> support than x86 linux drivers?
This Alpha is using PC hardware. Linux should work great on it.
J.
o-----------------------------------o
| Jeffrey Watts |
| watts at jayhawks.net o-------------------------------------o
| Systems Programmer | "If you really want to impress |
| Sprint - Systems Management | people with your computer |
o-------------------------------| literacy, add the words 'dot com' |
| to the end of everything you say, |
| dot com." |
| -- "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey" |
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