I just obtained a Alpha PCI64-275 Motherboard from Digital.  (Order number:
EK-ALPPI-CL.A01 if that helps).  It's close to working and at this time only
needs the 275W weird 3.3v power supply to work, hopefully I'll have it working
by next weekend.  I've been going over the NetBSD-Alpha port pages to see what
my chances are of running NetBSD on it and I have some basic questions if
someone could spare the time.

As I understand from the System Models page on www.netbsd.org, the floppy
controller and the IDE controller are not supported by NetBSD.

I do have a Fireport 40 UW SCSI controller which will probably not work with
the SRM console and therefore cannot be used to boot from.  From what I
gathered on the System Models page the ISA controller on board doesn't work
with the SRM console either, can the SRM console be updated to support other
devices to boot from and if so, where could I get the update, I tried looking
in the firmware update pages on gatekeeper but didn't exactly have much luck.

As I see it I have the following options:

  * Buy a network card and boot it from the network.
  * Buy a 53c810 based SCSI card and boot from a SCSI hard drive.
  * Wait for the IDE or Floppy controller to be supported (if ever?).
  * Use the Motherboard for something else.

If the floppy driver was supported I could probably just boot the kernel from
floppy and then continue from a SCSI device attached to the Fireport or
possibly from the IDE controller if NetBSD supports it.

Some advice would be greatly appreciated here, bear in mind that I'm a Alpha
newbie but I do know my way around NetBSD and have run it on both i386 and the
amiga.

---
Sigurbjörn Birkir Lárusson -- <sibbi@scour.org>
http://www.scour.org/ -- IRC nick: Sibbi/Sibbster
The opinions stated above are not neccesarily those of my employers
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be -- Simone Signoret