Yeah I have that one installed, I think it was part of adding the package… So I get my email saying everything is cool.

fx32 was really amazing cross of old and new tech. At its heart was an intrepeter, a profiler, and an instruction translator. The first run is always the worst as the intrepeter is slow, and the profiler looks for frequently executed blocks, which are saved to disk then translated after the fact. It was cool, but yes exe + dll code ended up being at least 2x the size. The real bummer is that you couldnt mix alpha and x86 dll’s, so plenty of runtimes had to be installed twice.

But we live in a ghz powered jit world where doing the recompile is fast enough on the fly.

The funny thing for me is now anything id want on the alpha i either have binary or source. Msvc 6 on the alpha rocked. But sadly the closed nature of dec making processors, chipsets, BIOS and boards wasnt going to give us taiwaneese dual, quad, or octa boards, otherwise who was going to buy them?

I still am amazed by MS’s terra server that pre-dated google earth in those critical 97 internet years, but MS couldnt leverege it, just as DEC did nothing of any signifigance with alta-vista.

I got Windows NT 4 on it quite nicely, FX!32 is a bit of a disappointment but I think I built it up too much over the years in my head.

I just wanted to play around with Linux on an alpha and only a crappy bug in X is stopping me, an older version would work most likely, but I am running a very up to date version of Gentoo. (only computer in my house running kernel 4!)

Alphas should be running NT… or VMS, if you like it somehow.

Its just one box, and on the other side of the planet…. But it does sound like a good idea, although if something does go wrong, there isn’t much I can do about it from here.

Oh, I did get that Alpha machine built, just having a nasty problem getting X running on it (and I think the Nouveau driver in Gentoo won’t work out the box!)