Thanks in advance (not so advance) for reading this thread.

I have Just a simple question.

I've been reading about it on some alphaserver pages and there is no problem to boot without a Video Card. Then I started to wander if there was a problem booting and managing Linux from a remote terminal (trough Telnet or SSH), becaus it would only be the router and mailserver (also the firewall but that is a router function). then I Just need to configure using a text terminal and not a grpahical interface.

It is an alphaserver 300 4/266 with a songle CPU. (64 bits of course)

The firmware is 6.1 and the OS is Red Hat linux 7.1 for alphaserver (alpha arch. CPU).

Thanks in advance for your help

I'm a bit of a loss as to what the question really is... can an alpha be booted without a video card? yeah, if the firmware supports it.

Cheers,

Finegan

Yes. but does linux support it??? Windows doesn't and I need the PCI bus (and findung an ISA video card for such an old alpha would be complicated... you know.

The firmware supports it (because the default configuration comes without a card with auto_action boot tru64. but I don't like tru64 for what I need and I know how to make it work with RH7.1 the problem is if it will boot... because if it won't... then I'll just install another OS instead of spending more than 2 hours installing RedHat and find with THAT complicaton at the end of the configuration.

Thanks again.

Okay, I see where your coming from now. I gotta admit my experience with the Alpha is about an hour and a half after a friend picked one up on Ebay with an older RH on it and I got to fiddle with it for a while before he FreeBSD'd it.

If you install serial, I have no idea, but there's gotta be something out there on the web. If you just install with the vid-card in there, which I'm guessing is what you want to do, and then pull it when your done, then as far as I remember the alpha's milo boot process, yes, it should never require user intervention during the boot process.

Knowing RH though, you're probably going to want to turn kudzo the heck off, otherwise its going to stop the boot process to ask you to configure whatever in the heck it is that you put in the pci slot after the video card. Kudzo has a timeout, but its annoyingly long. You're not reliant on kudzo for configuration, you can do anything that mess can do by hand.

That, and you have to remember that with RH7.1, if I got my versions right, you're not going to have the option for the ext3 or reiser file systems, if so, use one of them, because when the machine gets powered down wrong and fsck running on ext2 drops to a single user shell during init so that you can manually run fsck, its going to be annoying to fix that filesystem.

RH 7.1 is pretty old and most of the distros don't support bizarre architectures on every point release, so you may want to try one of the BSDs if all you're after is a solid UNIX environment.

Sorry about the confusion there,

Cheers,

Finegan

If I want a solid unix I'd go Tru64 (specially designed for alpha). But RE7.1 supports alpha archs and It goes well on other servers... the problem is that I can't install it without a vid card...

I will check out about kudzu.... but I'll have to configure that other PCI card anyway.... however that is what telnet is for (ssh in fact)

I didn't do a VERY good search on the net because I'm running out of time... I need that installed ASAP, you see. that is supposed to be my router... everyone is complaining about not having internet... and If I don't get that done fast I will have to sell the alpha and buy a sisco router (and loos of course all firewall abilities). That is why I posted it here without performing a perfect searh on the net. Though there isn't TOO much info about alpha....