The Challenge

I recently aquired two alpha DS25 servers. So of coures I wanted to run my favorite linux distribution on them which is Debian GNU/Linux. However Debian will not boot on these machines. Sucks don't you think? There are probably some other ways to get Debian installed on these machines. I will attempt them and updated this article based on my experiments. Hopefully others will find the information I provide here in this article valuable if they also have alpha servers and are struggling with the same challenge.

CentOS and Alpha Core 2

Apparently CentOS and Alpha Core 2 contain kernel patches that fix the booting issue that Debian currently faces. Debian developers are working on getting the upstream kernel developers to include the patches in the kernel sources. However it looks like the patches need a little work. So we will have to see what becomes of this. Good information to know though and maybe it will make itself useful.

Patch Links
Alpha Titan Systype Patch
Alpha Titan Video Rev2 Patch