Alpha/Linux Wiki

By mid-1998 the Alpha/Linux community had no central website. David Mosberger-Tang's site at azstarnet.com/~axplinux, the main reference, had gone quiet, and several smaller sites had appeared, among them Rich Payne's at adam.cheshire.net/~rdp/alpha, which he was already thinking of moving to www.alphalinux.org. ¹⁾

In a September 1998 axp-list thread calling for a single top-level site with an owner committed to keeping it current, ²⁾ Payne offered to host one with co-maintainers and asked the list to choose a name. ³⁾ The list chose alphalinux.org over linuxalpha.org and axplinux.org, partly because newcomers might not recognize "axp" as Alpha. ^{4) 5)} Barrett Lyon, a network security consultant and frequent axp-list contributor, registered the domain at his own expense and offered hosting, ^{6) 7)} and Payne built and maintained the site.

The site opened in late October 1998, with the content of Payne's old pages, ⁸⁾ and a redesign was announced on axp-list on 12 November 1998. ⁹⁾ Its initial purpose was to gather existing documentation: the Alpha FAQ, which Payne sought to migrate from azstarnet.com, ¹⁰⁾ the SRM HOWTO, kernel build guides, and high-performance computing resources. At subscribers' request it also archived axp-list and the Debian Alpha list. ^{11) 12)}

Within two weeks of the redesign, Adam C. Powell IV of NIST started a high-performance mailing list, high_perf, prompted by a high-performance page on the site. ¹³⁾ Powell at first ran the list himself, taking subscriptions by email; it was running on alphalinux.org's list server by May 2000. ¹⁴⁾

Lyon was the site's main news editor through 1999 and into 2000. Peter Petrakis was posting under an alphalinux.org address by 12 February 1999. ¹⁵⁾ He built ftp.alphalinux.org, a public FTP archive for RPMs and other Alpha software, which by the end of that month carried the latest GNOME release and a nearly complete mirror of the Alpha material on ftp.digital.com. ¹⁶⁾ The archive took community uploads through an incoming/ directory, with the rule that packages be built with -mcpu=ev4 so every Alpha could use them, optimized builds being welcome alongside an EV4-compatible version. ¹⁷⁾

Daniel Frasnelli was speaking for the site by March 1999. ¹⁸⁾ On the site's first anniversary he summarized its first year on axp-list: the group had received donations of web space, money, and hardware, and ran an administrative list at admin@alphalinux.org. ¹⁹⁾

Phillip Ezolt joined in March 2000 to collect games and demos for Alpha, alongside a new job-openings section on the site. ²⁰⁾ Ron Farrer, an Alpha hardware vendor active on axp-list, was writing articles for the site by April 2000, and in May 2000 he and Payne launched AlphaNews.net, a general Alpha news site. ²¹⁾

The web server for alphalinux.org was in California, where TheShell.com hosted it free of charge. ^{22) 23)} Payne's own machine, talisman, at mv.com, handled his alphalinux.org mail and, later, the project's mailing lists. ²⁴⁾ In April 1999 Compaq donated an AlphaServer 1200 to the project.

The mailing list archives were online at http://www.alphalinux.org/archives by May 1999, ²⁵⁾ and searchable from April 2000. ²⁶⁾

In addition to the main site and FTP archive, alphalinux.org hosted several mailing lists:

• high_perf, high-performance Alpha/Linux, November 1998 to November 2001
• milo-list, MILO boot loader development, April 1999 to November 2001
• axp-hardware and axp-software, distribution-neutral hardware and software discussion, launched 4 December 1999

The last two followed a suggestion by Farrer for a general Alpha and Linux list independent of Red Hat, which ran axp-list; ²⁷⁾ Payne set up both lists the same day, initially under majordomo. ²⁸⁾ By May 2000 the lists had moved to Mailman at lists.alphalinux.org, running on talisman.mv.com. ²⁹⁾

In September 2000 the site added a hardware compatibility database, open to submissions from anyone, to track which devices worked in which Alpha systems. ³⁰⁾

By 2002 the site was mostly unreachable. Its domain registrant, Lyon, could no longer be reached, and a backup site at linuxalpha.org ran on a machine offered by a Compaq employee. ^{31) 32)}

Payne and the other maintainers had recovered the domain by the end of that year, and the site then ran on a machine at crl.dec.com. ³³⁾ The content was no longer updated after that.

By 2008 alphalinux.org had gone years without updates. In April 2008, Matt Turner emailed Petrakis, proposing to take over maintenance himself. Petrakis agreed and suggested starting with a wiki section to see if it could attract contributors.

Turner created a MediaWiki installation in July 2008 and announced it on axp-list as a central location for Alpha hardware, Alpha/Linux support, SRM versions, Alpha assembly and optimization, and Alpha software. ³⁴⁾

The announcement asked the community to contribute hardware photographs, hard-to-find SRM versions, documentation, assembly programming examples, and information about important Alpha bugs. The wiki was used to coordinate work across distributions, for instance a patches page where the remaining Alpha ports could collect links to fixes still in flight. ³⁵⁾

Turner also kept a news section on the wiki, tracking developments in the Linux kernel, GCC, glibc, and X.Org as they related to Alpha. The main events of the period are described in History of the Linux port.

The wiki attracted a small number of regular contributors, whose systems ranged from EV45-based AlphaStations to quad-EV68 and dual-EV7 AlphaServers.

In June 2012 the server crashed and the wiki database, which had not been backed up, was lost.

In 2015, Petrakis and Payne, who still held the domain, transferred alphalinux.org to Gareth Randall, who maintained the site and a small wiki until mid-2026. Randall then transferred the domain to Turner, who created the alphalinux organization on GitHub to host repositories for Alpha packages (aboot, MILO), mailing list archives, and the content of this wiki. The wiki was rebuilt on DokuWiki in September 2026.