How to install FreeBSD/alpha.

THIS APPLIES TO 4.0-19990326-CURRENT

All the following information was gathered from about 10 hours of work trying to install FreeBSD/alpha. I personally think that the FreeBSD/alpha mailing list is a great resource and recommend that you subscribe.

You need to get the kern.flp image and mfsroot.gz for alpha from here (it's in a directory something like 4.0-19990326-CURRENT/floppies) or from a FreeBSD mirror site. To make the disks use one of the following commands.

FreeBSD:
    dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/rfd0
    dd if=mfsroot.flp of=/dev/rfd0
NT/DOS/95:
    fdimage kern.flp a:
    fdimage mfsroot.flp a:

Turn on the machine and insert the kern.flp disk. If your machine comes up with a blue screen you are probably running the ARC console and need to change to the SRM console. This is accomplished in the configuration menu. Once you have the SRM console running you will probably want to finish this install from a serial terminal (I used my laptop).

Attach a serial terminal to the machine and turn it on. The following display(or something similar) will appear:

Testing Memory from 8 to 128 meg...
Executing power-up script... 
version		BLS V3.8-3 Aug 10 1995 03:22:55
dka0.0.0.6.0		DKA0			SEAGATE ST31200N  8648
dva0.0.0.0.1		DVA0
ewa0.0.0.8.0		EWA0			08-00-2B-E4-33-61
pka0.7.0.6.0		PKA0			SCSI Bus ID 7

16 Meg of system memory

CPU speed is 166 MHZ
Cache size is 256 Kbytes

*** Keyboard not plugged in...
Keyboard error; using serial port terminal
>>>

Make sure the disk with the kern.flp image is in the disk drive and type:

>>> boot dva0    (or whatever the disk drive is)

The machine will run for a bit and you will see the following mesage:

FreeBSD/alpha SRM disk boot, Revision
(jkh@beast.cdrom.com,Wed Nov 25 16:13:25 GMT 1998)
Memory: 16384 k

It should ask for the disk containing the mfsroot.gz image. Insert the mfsroot.gz disk you made eariler and press enter.

You might also see this error message:

*** Soft Error - Error #10 - FDC: Data overrun or underrun

Diagnostic Name		ID	Device	Pass  Test  Hard/Soft  5-DEC-1998
boot		  0000006e	err_iob    0     0     0   10  15:10:43

*** End of error

This error is harmless. I got about 30 of them the first time I started the kern.flp disk.

If the machine locks up or gives lots of errors after it says "jumping to bootstrap code" you need to upgrade your firmware. The firmware upgrade can be found here.

If all goes well you will see the FreeBSD install menu. From here you install just like a i386 system.

After the install you need to try booting from the harddrive. When you exit the install program(on a Multia) to reboot you will probably see a bunch of error messages, the last one will be something like:

0012FF08! BPT

At this time you need to turn off the machine and let it sit for a minute then turn it back on.

To boot from the hard drive type:

>>> boot dka0 -flags a

Alpha machines, by default, don't give an interactive session on the serial console. It will look like it is locked up after it starts local deamons and gives the time, but in fact it IS working. You can telnet to the machine.

If you don't have any users, besides root, you will not be able to telnet into the machine. By default all the ttyv?? are marked insecure. You'll have to reboot into single user mode and add some users. To do this enter this line at the console prompt:

>>> boot dka0

If you need an interactive session on the console use vi and edit the /etc/ttys file. Change the ttyd0 line so that it says on instead of off.

# Serial terminals
# The 'dialup' keyword identifies dialin lines to login, fingerd etc.
ttyd0	"/usr/libexec/getty std.9600"	unknown	on	secure

This will give you a login prompt on the serial console.

Any questions??? please e-mail me mturpin@spel.com or you can join the freebsd-alpha mailing list by sending e-mail to majordomo@freebsd.org with the subject line "subscribe freebsd-alpha"

Thanks for visiting and good luck!

Mark Turpin