IMPORTANT! Installing Linux on the Alpha is not trivial; you do NOT want to blindly follow these directions. Please read the following documents before proceeding:

Alpha-HOWTO (see http://www.alphalinux.org/alpha-howto.html)
SRM-HOWTO (see http://www.alphalinux.org/faq/srm.html)
AS200 Support Page (see http://www.toast.net/~strycher/AS200.html)
RedHat-5.1 Users Manual and Alpha Addendum
Alphastation Users Manual (console commands section in particular)

These instructions are not authoritative or garaunteed to work on your system; they are simply my best recollection of the steps I used to get my Alphastation running RedHat-5.1. Do let me know if this helps you/works for you, and also contact me if you find any errors in these instructions. I can be reached at bryan@terran.org.

Step 1 Make all necessary boot floppies. For my RedHat-5.1 install on Alphastation 200 (Avanti Mustang), this included avanti-s.img and ramdisk.img.

Step 2 Boot the boot disk from the SRM console. The command line I used was: >>> boot dva0 -fi vmlinux.gz -fl "prompt_ramdisk=1 load_ramdisk=1 \ root=/dev/fd0" (all on one line). **Note: the "root=/dev/fd0" did not appear in my RedHat-5.1 manual, though it is required**

Step 3 Proceed with the RedHat install (switching floppies, etc) until you reach the partitioning stage. Define the PC-style partitions you want, leaving space at the beginning of the drive (1MB should be plenty); what I did was start my first partition on cylinder 2 instead of cylinder 1. Write down the start and end offsets of each partition. Save the partition table.

Step 4 Continue with the install through the finish. When the install is complete, put the boot disk back in the floppy and reboot your Alpha.

Step 5 At the SRM prompt, you want to boot the floppy with your fixed disk as the root filesystem: >>> boot dva0 -fi vmlinux.gz -fl "root=/dev/sda2" This assumes your root filesystem is mounted on /dev/sda2; the second partition of the first SCSI fixed-disk.

Step 6 Go into fdisk and create a BSD-style disklabel. This requires the "b" option in fdisk. You must define partitions *exactly* as they were originally defined with the PC-style partition table. This means there must be the same number of partitions and they must start and end on the same cylinder boundaries. Any difference will trash your filesystem and you will need to reinstall. Do not refer to the PC-style partition table again; it will not be used any longer. **Note: the PC-style partition table is only used in the installation stage in order to work around a bug in the RedHat 5.1/AXP install for SRM.**

Step 7 Reboot again (using the floppy from Step 5) and install aboot. The command looks like this: # swriteboot /dev/sda bootlx This assumes your first SCSI disk is where you will boot from.

Step 8 You should now be able to reboot directly from the SRM console. Boot Linux with the following command line: >>> boot dka0 -fi 2/vmlinux.gz -fl "root=/dev/sda2" This assumes that your root filesystem and kernel image are both on the second partition of the first SCSI fixed-disk. You may define the boot device, boot file and boot flags as defaults in the SRM console. See your manual for details.