[Info-vax] OT: Linux on IA64 and-or Alpha

[Neil Rieck]

On Thursday, September 1, 2016 at 11:30:38 AM UTC-4, Steven Schweda wrote:
> > [...] any better version of Linux.
> 
>    Define "better".
> 
>    I know nothing, but at one time I seem to have installed a
> Debian on a disk in my rx2600:
> 
> debi# uname -a
> Linux debi 2.6.32-5-mckinley #1 SMP Mon Oct 3 06:04:14 UTC 2011 ia64 GNU/Linux
> 
> debi# cat /etc/issue
> Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 \n \l
> 
> /dev/sdc2 has gone 1136 days without being checked, check forced.
> 
>    Clearly, I don't do much with it, and I don't know what
> the current Debian IA64 situation might be.

Yep, I have already downloaded the Debian 7.9.0 DVD (published in 2015) but it appears that Debian will not be producing an IA64 version of Debian 8

Not sure of the reason but these companies give away the software and hope that it will translate into support contracts. So either not many people are running Linux on IA64 -OR- it hasn't resulted in any meaningful support contracts.

###

I'm new to this but have just learned that most Linux distros publish huge machine-specific binaries which requires a major effort for each release. 

Meanwhile, Gentoo publishes a machine-specific minimal boot CD (which rarely changes) then attempts to build what you require during installation from a common tar-ball (which changes every few weeks). This allows them to offer software for all kinds of hardware like Alpha, system/390, PlayStation3, SPARC, MIPS, etc. 

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.