Tru64 runs like charm on it, and uses the display card well. Windows 2000 also has a driver for it (I haven't tried it out yet). But I wanted to give a shot with a modern desktop OS as well, and here came Linux to save me.
I thought there are many recent distros supporting alpha architecture, but it turned out my only practical choice can Gentoo be, all others have long ago dropped their support. So Gentoo let it be! What you need to know about Gentoo, is practically you have to install everything from sources, which means compiling. A lot of compiling... and even more!
You also need to know, that this old machine, with it's single 500MHz CPU takes it's time when it comes to compiling such big things, like Linux kernel... more than 18 hours! That much. So, compiling X, and all of it's dependencies, and a media player, and configuring everything, was out of reach practically.
I also wanted to keep the nice, big, expensive graphic card in there, to use Tru64, and later even Windows 2000. However, since it was a high-end (and very expensive) card back at it's days, it unfortunately lacks any linux support and drivers. But this in itself a complete story of it's own right.
What I choose to do, is set up Qemu user land emulation of Alpha (AXP) CPU on mu laptop (x86-64, 4 cores, 16GByte RAM), put this stage3 Alpha tarball into my other Gentoo disk, chroot into it, install and configured everything I wanted to have a starting system on the PWS, then copied the image to it, and boot up. It's quite simple to say, but I had some headache during the process, bumping into barriers here and there.
In the next chapters, I will describe the gotchas till I got here.
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