Good day all, I am presently running Debian on my Celeron home computer, but would like to experiment with a 21164 based Alpha workstation. Any advice from the Debian Alpha community would be much appreciated.
Packages: Having researched Paul Slootman's Alpha/i386 diffs page ( http://auric.debian.org/~paul/alpha/diff/ ), it seems that the stable potato release of Alpha had roughly 116 fewer packages than the i396 release. This seems pretty good overall. Does Debian Alpha usually keep up with the i386 packages this well? Are there any major packages missing from the Alpha distro? Compiling: My understanding is that the compiler released by Digital for use with Linux does a much better job of compiling than the standard GCC compiler - resulting in much faster code. Are the binaries compiled for the Debian Alpha distribution made using the Digital compiler, or GCC? Desktop practicality: Since this would be a home computer, the Debian Alpha system would mostly be used for web browsing, email, word processing, playing CDs, etc. No game playing though. While I know that Alphas are superb scientific and engineering workstations, how well do they manage in this sort of home user role? Many thanks, -- Luke Seubert
