Re: Newbie's 6.0 Installation Support Experience for Alpha Release

[Charles Taylor <charlet hubcap clemson edu>]

> I was encouraged by the Red Hat offer of installation assistance (telephone
> & email) to give it a try  on an alpha I acquired for this purpose.

Honestly, I've never had "installation support" for *any* piece of
software be worth a damn.  But still, Redhat should strive to be
better than average, especially since they raised the price of the
product with this support as a reason.

> the solution to (1) involved using mkfs.msdos to format the partition and
> copying the required files there. Hardly an Alpha-specific problem.

During the *installation*, that is a fairly Alpha-specific problem.
Neither Sparc nor x86 installs require the creation of a formatted
MSDOS partition to install.

> the solution to (3) only required locating the appropirate kernel file
> (*z.n.n.n) in the /boot directory and telling MILO to use it.

Get used to this if you plan on trying different kernel builds.  It's
always nice to have another boot selection that falls back on a kernel
that you know works.
 
> (2) would have not been an issue were it not for my efforts at resolving
> (1). It would have been nice for someone to formally record the doc error
> for the benefit of others whether or not they knew anything of the Alpha
> platform.

Historically, the Alpha docs have always had errors or omissions.  Not
an excuse for RH 6.0, just an observation.
 
> (4) could have been a show-stopper since not being able to use the Linux
> 6.0 system in anything other then text mode would have been a major
> disappointment. Some help would have been appreciated despite the use of a
> DEC TGA graphics adapter.

TGA support's dodgy at best, from my experience.  Best to (if you
can), replace with a card with better X support (Matrox, S3, etc.)

> In any event, I need to understand what level of support I can expect
> during the 30 day telephone support period and the 90 day email support
> period.

I'd search Dejanews (comp.os.linux.alpha newsgroup) or the archives to
this mailing list before calling them for support.  You paid for it,
but these methods are usually quicker.

-- 
Charles E. "Rick" Taylor, IV <charlet@clemson.edu>
http://orangesherbert.ces.clemson.edu
"We got the MRxL, and you got none!"