Alpha Linux Wiki:Community Portal

Distributions

In the past, most major distributions supported the Alpha Architecture, but as time goes on, fewer continue to maintain their ports.

Current

Gentoo Linux has a maintained Alpha port.

The latest Debian release, Squeeze, did not include the Alpha port, however work is continuing on the Alpha port at Debian-Ports. Currently there is no install CD but Debian Alpha can be installed with debootstrap.

Unmaintained

Many Linux distributions once supported Alpha, but do not any longer or have been discontinued. The following lists distributions who supported Alpha in the past and the last Alpha-supporting release.

• Debian Lenny
• Red Hat 7.2
• AlphaCore 3
• CentOS 4.6
• SuSE 7.1
• Openwall 2.0

FreeBSD also discontinued their Alpha port after the 6.x series.

An experimental Fedora port also existed, but its last maintainer says it's now dead

Newsgroups

A few newsgroups exist for Alpha users, namely

• comp.os.linux.alpha for discussion of running Linux on Alpha
• comp.sys.dec for discussion about DEC Computers
• linux.debian.ports.alpha for discussion of running Debian on Alpha

While not pertaining to Linux or Alpha, hardware information may be found in the comp.sys.vms and comp.unix.tru64 newsgroups.

Mailing Lists

The main mailing list for Alpha Linux users is the axp-list hosted by Red Hat.

Also, Gentoo and Debian both have Alpha related lists.

The Red Hat list gets the most traffic and isn't geared toward a specific Linux distribution. The Gentoo list has extremely low volume and it entirely for Gentoo related discussion.

An Alpha/Linux Kernel mailing list is hosted at vger.kernel.org. To subscribe, send an email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org with a blank subject line with body subscribe linux-alpha. Archives are located on marc.info.

While not pertaining to Linux, Alpha hardware information may be found in the FreeBSD Alpha, NetBSD Alpha, OpenBSD Alpha Mailing Lists.

IRC

A general Alpha discussion channel exists at #alpha on irc.freenode.net. Also, a Gentoo oriented channel exists at #gentoo-alpha, also on Freenode.

Forums

Gentoo has a Gentoo on Alternative Architectures forum.