Three Linux distributions produce current releases for Alpha: Gentoo, Debian through its Ports archive, and T2 SDE. Many more supported Alpha in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Alpha was a commercial Linux platform; the last of those ended around 2006. This page covers both. Install media and instructions are on the Installation page, and the lists and channels each distribution uses on Community.
| Distribution | Status | Install media |
|---|---|---|
| Gentoo | Supported. The Alpha profiles are stable, but every package keyword is unstable (~alpha) | Minimal install CD and weekly stage3 tarballs, distfiles.gentoo.org |
| Debian | Unofficial port in Debian Ports, built for unstable (sid) | Netinst CD snapshots, cdimage.debian.org |
| T2 SDE | Supported, built for EV56 | ISO images, dl.t2sde.org |
The three differ mainly in how they are installed. Gentoo is installed by hand from a shell, from a stage3 tarball; Debian has its own installer, and builds only the unstable distribution; T2 publishes ready-built ISO images, among them a desktop variant. Debian's installer kernel supports the Titan, Wildfire, and Marvel systems, such as the DS25, ES45, and ES47; Gentoo's install CD supports them with a second kernel that is not the default; see Installation: Distribution kernels.
Gentoo Linux has a maintained Alpha port, installed by hand from a minimal install CD and a stage3 tarball, following the Gentoo Handbook for Alpha. New stage3 tarballs, for OpenRC and systemd, are built regularly. 1) All packages are keyworded unstable (~alpha), and have been since January 2020; the Alpha profiles are stable. The Alpha profile sets ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="alpha ~alpha", so these unstable packages are installed without further configuration. 2)
The profile sets CHOST to alpha-unknown-linux-gnu and no -mcpu, so the stages run on any Alpha processor that the kernel supports. 3) The port uses the gentoo-alpha mailing list and the #gentoo-alpha IRC channel. Its history is described under Community History.
Alpha was an official Debian architecture from Debian 2.1 (1999) 4) to 5.0 (2009), 5) and is now an unofficial port in Debian Ports, which builds only the unstable distribution (sid). The port is maintained by Michael Cree and others.
Debian Ports publishes netinst CD images as dated snapshots. 6) Since May 2023 Debian's GCC has generated EV56 code by default; see Distribution baselines. The port uses the debian-alpha mailing list.
After installation, APT is set up for the Debian Ports archive rather than the main Debian archive. The recommended /etc/apt/sources.list entries are:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports unstable main deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports unreleased main
The unreleased suite holds packages that need changes not yet integrated into Debian, and an experimental suite is also available. The archive is signed with the keys in the debian-ports-archive-keyring package. 7)
T2 SDE is a source-based system development environment that builds complete distributions for many architectures, among them Alpha. It publishes Alpha ISO images, built for EV56 since 2025, in several variants, such as a desktop and a minimal base system. 8)
Many Linux distributions formerly supported Alpha. The table lists each one's last Alpha release. Dates and versions are taken from the mailing list archives described in Community History.
| Distribution | Last Alpha release | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| BLADE | 0.3 | "Basic Linux/Alpha Distribution Eyesore", Digital's own distribution, first released in July 1995; superseded during 1996 by Red Hat's Alpha release. See Digital. |
| Craftworks Linux/AXP | 2.2 | Commercial distribution sold on CD. See Craftworks. |
| Red Hat Linux | 7.2 | See Red Hat. |
| SuSE Linux | 7.1 | Former members of the SuSE Alpha team later released an unofficial SuSE Linux 8.1 Alpha Edition. See SuSE. |
| Mandrake Linux | 7.1 | Developed in the open on the cooker-axp list. See MandrakeSoft. |
| TurboLinux | 6.0 | Alpha edition shipped in July 2000. See TurboLinux. |
| AlphaCore | 3 | Unofficial port of Fedora Core to Alpha. Its last release, Alpha Core 3, was based on Fedora Core 5. 9) |
| CentOS | 4 | The Alpha tree was declared end of life by its maintainer in August 2006. |
A Slackware port to Alpha was attempted more than once, most seriously in 2001, but was never completed and had been abandoned by 2004.