Thanks for everyone who gave me pointers on running XFree on my
AlphaStation 500. I'm running 1.6K, and downloaded the XFree 4.2.1
sources from www.caseydoodle.com, and set up my kernel config
accordingly. However, there are some glitches.

 1. dev/ic/vga.c does some things differently for __alpha__
    Especially irritating was the fact that it sets up the
    firmware blue as background color, and this really does
    not do the right thing. Depending on what I run on the
    console, the screen is sometimes with black background,
    sometimes with blue, and sometimes its mixed.

    For example, I start NetBSD and the background is all
    blue. I run "more <whatever>". The first page comes up
    with blue background, the next with black etc. Then
    running somethings else (for example, logout, after which
    login runs) the background starts going blue again.

    If I run "vi", the background is blue, but if I run
    "vim" and it does its own syntax highlighting, the blue
    background messes everything up very badly.

    Just removing the __alpha__ specific colour handling
    at around line 455 in dev/ic/vga.c gives me sensible,
    always black background. (But this also requires
    PCDISPLAY_SOFTCURSOR option.)

 2. After exiting X, the font on the console is screwed up.
    (Could this be a gfx controller issue, I've got an old
     S3 Trio).
    But, somehow, this does not happen everytime...

 3. With and without the vga.c hack above, running X in
    8 bit mode, white colour appears as blue. 16 bit mode
    is OK. (I tried running X with noaccel, and it didn't
    help).

 4. PCDISPLAY_SOFTCURSOR does not do the right thing after
    I exit X. IOW, I see both the soft cursor and the blinking
    cursor which stays always at the upper left corner of screen.