“I recently came into a pile of elderly hardware, including a
Digital Alpha Multia and an SGI IRIS. I’ve run FreeBSD for years,
but never had a chance to play with anything other than x86
architectures. My first thought was to install FreeBSD on the
Multia. The install went simply enough, but I discovered that
FreeBSD doesn’t support the Multia’s TGA framebuffer video. It
makes a decent enough server, if you can call something that runs
like treacle in February and generates enough heat to roast burgers
“decent.”
“Unfortunately, I wanted this as a desktop machine. There’s
a certain amount of “geek stud” factor in having an Alpha
workstation, even if it’s a Multia. A bit of checking around showed
that NetBSD supported the Multia’s video, so I decided to give it a
try.“
“I downloaded boot floppies from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org. Rather
than FreeBSD’s kern.flp and mfsroot.flp, these had the simpler
names of “disk1of2” and “disk2of2″. To this day, after more FreeBSD
installs than I care to count, I still can’t remember which floppy
to use first. I used dd to copy the images onto floppies and
booted.”