Speakup kernels on Alpha

[Janina Sajka]

Yeah, it really is rather cool to have one of these monsters spitting up their bios to a Braille Lite. And you really don't need a video card either. My machine doesn't have a video card--Speakup just references the dummy video driver.

If you know Debian better, then stick with it. I believe Debian packages for Alpha are more up to date. The last Red Hat release for Alpha is 7.2, though there is some movement for porting Fedora.

It's old hardware, though, and finding parts can be challenging.

Alex Snow writes:
> Hi,
> I'm also looking to aquire an old alpha (the au series has caught my
> attention recently). What's the best distro one should run on these
> machines? I know debian supports alpha and I think redhat/fedora do, but
> which of those two would be the easiest to get up and running? I'm thinking
> debian because I already have a fair amount of experience with that distro.
> 
> One of the reasons I'm going for the alpha (other then being cool and
> 64-bit) is the accessibility of it's hardware settings. This is the same
> with my microvax (which doesn't even have a graphics card in it) and I kind
> of like being able to modify bios settings without sited help.