I've tried FreeBSD on my Alpha. It also has these lockups. It's mostly XFree86 (both v4 and v3) that freezes, but I've had freezes in FreeBSD (4.3RELEASE and 5.0CURRENT from 200103-something) even without running X, and that has NOT yet happened on Linux 2.2.19 (it has on 2.4.x though)...
The biggest problem with FreeBSD/Alpha though is that the ports-collection is still very x86-ish. About 30% of the ports fails to compile on Alpha... I've reported a LOT of compilefailures, but since 99% of the FreeBSDers seems to be running x86, most ports mainainers either don't care or don't know how to fix it. Then, I have also managed to make Tru64 5.1 crash by running graphicsintensive (like avifile/mplayer)-apps from a remote x86 Linuxbox and by running buggy Open3D apps... Regards Per Wigren Don't get me wrong, I love debian, but I absolutely hate in on my Alpha For that matter I hate any linux on my alpha, the all lock up for some odd reason but I can run BSD on them with out a problem, it's a sx164 I loaded it with redhat 5.2 like 4 or 5 years ago and that was the only one that actually ran stable on my machine!!! If you're havin that much trouble give BSD a try and load bash up as the shell and it will make it seem like you are using a Linux machine thanks to ports, No joke
