The new Term at University started last week. Because I am working fulltime again, I have only joined two courses, Compiler Construction and Prolog Programming. The first Assignment in the Compiler Construction course is programming Assembler on the Alpha.
This is a good reason to boot my two alpha systems again. I am trying to install the Compag C Compiler, but this is no simple task, because it requires the Linuxulator. Unfortunately the default linux_base ports for i386 linux_base-7 and linux_base-8 are both not available for alpha, because RedHat stopped distributing binaries for the alpha platform several years ago. linux_base-6 is available for alpha, but is a) marked FORBIDDEN because of several unpatched security vulnerabilities and b) was accidently broken several months ago. Obviously nobody is using the linuxulator on alpha anymore, because nobody complained.
The other alternative linux_base port available is linux_base-debian, but i think this one is still experimental.
If I succeed installing a linux_base I will have to fix bsd.port.mk to change the default for the alpha architecture.