10. AlphaStation 200

These boxes have become quite popular recently because they are now available cheaply (Digital is clearing out the warehouse ??) which makes them the successor to the UDB as a lower end way into the Alpha world. Onsale and Webauction are the places to get them.

Rick Taylor ( Charles E. Taylor IV) supplied the following details:

CPU

The AS200 comes with 21064 or 21064A CPUs. Speeds are 166MHz and 233 MHz. The support chipset is the 21071-AA.

cache

Apart from the on-chip cache, there is 512K of cache on the mainboard.

memory

There are 6 slots for 72 pin true parity SIMMs. Slots must be filled in pairs. According to the specs, 384 megs of RAM can be added. The items from Onsale seem to come with 16 MB. You may want to add some before installing Linux.

disc

The base configuration does not include any discs...

video

.. nor a graphics card. Any Alpha supported PCI video card should work: S3Virge DX (4MB) and S3Trio64V2 (2MB) definitely do.

Some more quotes from Rich's mail:

• "As with most of these older Alphas, upgrading the firmware is all but a necessity to install Linux. Mine came with an older SRM that just wouldn't load the Linux kernel without locking, and upgrading to the latest ARC fixed the problem. Mine came from the batch of Alphas that onsale and webauction have been (and still are, in the case of webauction) selling, so I'd assume other new AS200 owners might have similar problems."
• "To get the builtin sound card to work you need to recompile the kernel on RedHat. Fairly simple, but I just talked a guy through it on the RedHat-AXP list, so I thought I'd mention it. :)"
• "Something that surprised me when I first installed (before I hooked the machine into the local ethernet network and while I was using PPP): my modem wouldn't work on the first com port. I suspect that had something to do with the serial console setting. The symptom was the modem constantly getting traffic when no program should have been talking to it. Not too tough to figure out, but it could be rather confusing to someone who didn't get the documentation with their machine. A quick fix is to simply use the other com port for the modem."
• "My AS200 came with something of an oddity - an ISA card with two PCMCIA slots on it. According to the DEC shipping label it was an option, but as I don't have any PCMCIA devices, I removed the card from the machine and put it in storage. I'm not sure if/how the card works in Linux, and I didn't get any documentation for the card, so I don't have much information on it."

If you have bought one of them you may find the following URL's useful: both give a step by step recipe to get Linux installed.
http://www.alphalinux.org/docs/as200.shtml
http://www.mindspring.com/~ccsf-lug/AS200.htm