questions about alpha

[Alex Deucher]

I just picked up an old alphastation 500 on ebay and I'd like to
install gentoo on it.  I've read over the handbook, but I have a few
questions.

- ecu seems to be required to enable the sound card on AS500.  Is that
an srm utility, an external utility, or something I run from linux?

- has anyone tried alphacore on AS500?

- I'd like mess around with xorg on alpha.  I'm running srm 6.7-2 and
it won't post my pci radeon 9000, so for the time being I have an old
s3virge in there.  does anyone have any experience with the newer srm
(7.2) and radeon cards?  I've heard arc/alphabios is better at posting
video cards.  Is there any truth to that?  Also I seem to recall
having read somewhere that milo or aboot will also post video cards is
srm can't.  Is this true?

- How does one upgrade the srm?  I've not be able to find any
particularly clear instructions anywhere.  DEC/Compaq/HP's
instructions seem to be about all there are and they are pretty vague.
 They all talk about some firmware/sdk cdrom that you can boot to
upgrade.  I haven't been able to find such a disc anywhere.  Can I
just burn the fireware update .exe files to cdrom, or is some special
preparation required?


Thanks,

Alex