Alpha/Linux Wiki

This page describes the mailing lists and newsgroups where Alpha/Linux was discussed, most of them now closed, and the history of Gentoo's Alpha port. See Community for the lists and channels still in use, Distributions for the distributions past and present, and History of alphalinux.org for the site that hosted several of the lists below.

The first Alpha/Linux mailing list was Digital's own. Jim Paradis announced linux-axp@amt.tay1.dec.com in November 1994, ¹⁾ and moved it to majordomo as alpha-linux in January 1995, replacing "the old, unreliable, hand-maintained list". ²⁾ No archive of it is known to survive.

Several once-popular Alpha/Linux mailing lists are no longer hosted anywhere. The largest was axp-list, run by Red Hat from 22 November 1995 until its last message in February 2022, alongside the kernel-focused axp-kernel-list. Separate lists ran on alphalinux.org: axp-hardware, axp-software, milo-list (MILO development), and high_perf (High Performance Alpha/Linux). Mandrake ran cooker-axp for the Alpha port of its Cooker development branch.

Mirrors of all of these, reconstructed from Pipermail and MHonArc pages, Gmane, and Wayback Machine captures, are preserved at alphalinux/mailing-list-archives on GitHub. The same repository holds a complete mbox archive of the Debian debian-alpha list, which lists.debian.org serves only as per-message HTML, and an archive of Gentoo's gentoo-alpha list. These two lists are still open; the table below covers them along with the closed lists.

axp-kernel-list, for "Alpha kernel issues", was running by August 1998. ³⁾ No archive of it from before April 2002 is known to survive.

gentoo-alpha began on 17 December 2002. ⁴⁾ The port's developers also met on #gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net from at least February 2003. ⁵⁾ The list is still open but has carried little traffic since the mid-2010s. ⁶⁾

The longest-lived Alpha mailing list was not about Linux. alpha-osf-managers was a list for system managers of Alpha systems running DEC OSF/1, run on Majordomo at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by Dave Sill, who also ran the older decstation-managers list. It was running by June 1993, ⁷⁾ and the DEC OSF/1 FAQ pointed readers to it from its first posting. ⁸⁾ In August 1995 Sill put archives of both lists, going back to October 1993, on ftp.ornl.gov. The surviving mirror of alpha-osf-managers begins in April 1994; the earlier messages are not in it. ⁹⁾

Answers went privately to the asker, who then posted a summary back to the list, so its archive reads as a series of questions and summaries. ¹⁰⁾ Digital's engineers answered there too, most prolifically Tom Blinn of the UNIX Software Group, whose posts are the best surviving record of when each release of the operating system shipped (see Tru64 UNIX).

The list followed the operating system's renames. It became tru64-unix-managers on 16 March 1999, with the old address to be disabled around 16 April. ¹¹⁾ It never formally closed. Traffic fell from about 3,300 messages in 2003 to a dozen in 2012 as members retired their last Alphas. ¹²⁾ The last message is dated 28 September 2012. ¹³⁾

Alpha hardware and porting information may also be found in the FreeBSD Alpha, NetBSD Alpha, and OpenBSD Alpha mailing lists. These three lists are mirrored in the same archive repository. They are the best surviving record of the parts of Alpha that Linux shares with the BSDs: PALcode and console behavior, chipset errata, unaligned access and floating-point trap handling.

FreeBSD retired its Alpha port after the 6.x series and closed the list at the end of 2010. The NetBSD and OpenBSD lists are still active.

alphant, the Windows NT on Alpha mailing list, covered the same hardware as the Linux lists, and Digital's own engineers answered questions on it much as they did on axp-list. Aaron Sakovich started it in September 1995 at Net Results, an Internet provider in Huntsville, Alabama; ¹⁴⁾ it later moved to Allen-Bradley and, in October 1998, to Peter Lizon's alphant.com. ¹⁵⁾ Every host is gone, and only what the Wayback Machine captured survives.

Usenet carried Alpha discussion from the early 1990s; the main groups are listed in the table below. linux.debian.ports.alpha was also a gateway to the debian-alpha mailing list.

Digital ran two moderated groups of its own, biz.digital.announce for press releases and fact sheets and biz.digital.articles for the Customer Update product announcements. Both carried the company's own descriptions of Alpha hardware as it shipped, and both are useful for dating and specifying machines that the surviving manuals do not cover. Neither ran for as long as the archives suggest: the last real Customer Update article is from December 1995 and the last press release from April 1997, and everything the archives hold after that is spam.

Announcements of Alpha ports, kits and distributions were posted to comp.os.linux.announce, which is where Digital's early Alpha/Linux work was made public.

comp.os.linux.alpha was created in 1997 on David Mosberger-Tang's proposal, which sought "a focused and vendor-neutral place for discussing issues related to Linux on Alpha". ¹⁶⁾ The vote closed on 30 June 1997 and passed 687 to 9. ¹⁷⁾

DEC OSF/1 had its own groups, comp.unix.osf.osf1 and comp.unix.osf.misc, which also covered OSF/1 on other vendors' hardware. The DEC OSF/1 FAQ was posted to comp.unix.osf.osf1 and comp.sys.dec from 1993 to 1995. ^{18) 19)}

comp.unix.tru64 was created in March 2000 by renaming comp.unix.osf.osf1, and comp.unix.osf.misc was removed at the same time. ²⁰⁾

Google Groups stopped carrying new Usenet posts in February 2024, so these links serve historic content only. Mbox archives of all nine groups, built from the Internet Archive's usenet-comp and usenet-biz collections and as complete as those collections allow, are kept alongside the mailing lists in alphalinux/mailing-list-archives.

Gentoo's Alpha port has always been small. In February 2003 it had three developers, Bjoern Brauel, Will Woods, and Aron Griffis, and the port stalled whenever all three were busy at their jobs. ²¹⁾ Its stage tarballs were built for the EV5, for compatibility. ²²⁾ Tavis Ormandy joined in April 2003, bringing ebuilds for the Compaq C and C++ compilers. ²³⁾

The first Alpha LiveCD built with Gentoo's catalyst tool came from Jay Maynard in February 2004, with separate kernels for normal use, for systems booting with MILO, and for the Jensen. ²⁴⁾ Bryan Østergaard (kloeri) took over release building in August 2004 ²⁵⁾ and led the port for the next few years. The port dropped the Compaq Java runtime and development kit in July 2006, leaving Alpha without a full Java implementation, ²⁶⁾ and ended 2.4 kernel support on 19 January 2008, after every other Gentoo architecture team. ²⁷⁾

In September 2019 the port lost its build machine, a quad-CPU ES40 that had been hosted without charge for many years. ²⁸⁾ Every alpha keyword became ~alpha on 25 January 2020, ²⁹⁾ and the Alpha profiles were demoted to experimental on 17 May 2022, so as not to hold back the Python team. ³⁰⁾ They were restored to stable on 10 August 2024. ³¹⁾