Re: NetBSD on Digital Personal Workstation 433a

[Marco Beishuizen <mbeis%xs4all.nl@localhost>]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2019, the wise Stefan wrote:

> Goodday all,
>
> I have just been giving a Digital Personal Workstation 433a and I 
> thought it would be nice to install NetBSD on it but I am not quite sure 
> if the system is supported (as I cant get it to boot into the installer) 
> ?
>
> So I suppose that would be major question one really. The system comes 
> with 320MB memory, a digital Q-Logic SCSI controller, two 4GB SCSI disks 
> and I replaced the IDE Plextor CDROM drive with a IDE Pioneer DVD drive 
> (because I had it lying around and its a better drive then the Plextor)
>
> Your thoughts ?

When I got my PWS600au ~15 years ago I installed FreeBSD on it and even 
got X working. A few years ago I revived the Alpha and installed NetBSD, 
since FreeBSD had dropped support for it, but X didn't work anymore. Today 
the Alpha is still running right next to me but it runs OpenVMS and CDE 
with a supported videocard.

There is some variation of hardware components in the PWS. Older PWS's had 
a bug in the IDE chip. I had to replace a failing CDROM drive with an old 
2 speed SCSI CDROM because of it. Some newer PWS's have USB.

There is useful information in the (older) FreeBSD handbook about Alphas 
and running a BSD on it:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/hardware-alpha.html

Regards,
Marco
--
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