Table of Contents
This chapter is mostly about running Linux on non-ia32 (non-cheap and horribly broken, that is) hardware.
In the following discussion, I basically recommend the following, simple partition layout. You may want to create more partitions, but since most of the older computers aren't equipped with all that large hard disk drives, it's only a waste of needed space to have more partitions:
First, a small boot partition (mounted on /boot) to hold the kernel image(s). Note that you not only may need that for older ia32-style computers. Even other machines (Sparc32 systems come to mind) need it!
Next partition is a swap partition, size should depend on actual RAM size and the foreseen job for the box.
The third and last partition is meant to be the largest partition, containing the root filesyetem (thus, mounted on /).
Alphas do basically come along with two totally different firmware types. Most machines actually can switch between both. First, it's AlphaBIOS, which either looks like an old Windows 3.1, or like a simple ncurses-style menu-driven window-system. If you have this firmware running, you need to use PC-BIOS partition layout and you'll need a separate, small partition holding the milo boot loader as well as the kernel image.
If you've got an Alpha using SRM firmware (you'll have textmode with blue background and ">>> " prompt), you need to use BSD slices as partition layout. Also, aboot is the boot loader of choice.