>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.
Smart move. >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? They do a pretty good job. There will always be some packages that i386 that alpha does not and vice versa. >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? Compaq's FORTRAN and C compiler definitely create faster code; particularly code that extensively uses floating-point operations. But, for average use, gcc-compiled is just fine. I don't know for sure, but I would speculate that the Debian-supplied binaries are gcc compiled. >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? Should do fine. However, you will not see a great deal of speed increase over an i386 until you use it for crunching numbers; lots of them. -- /------------------------------------------------------------------\ |James D. Freels, P.E._i, Ph.D.|Phone: (865)576-8645 | | L | A | |Oak Ridge National Laboratory |FAX: (865)574-9172 | H | I | L | |Research Reactors Division |work e-m: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | F | N | P | |P. O. Box 2008 |home [EMAIL PROTECTED]| I | U | H | |Oak Ridge, TN. 37831-6392 |world's best neutrons | R | X | A | \------------------------------------------------------------------/
