Posts by Liam Proven

Re: "The chances of this making any discernible difference in performance are minimal"

Good to hear it!

Probably my fondness for running elderly trailing edge budget priced kit had protected me from this.

Re: re: downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice.

How do they handle filling the disk up? That happened to me regularly (due to unpurged snapshots) and it inevitably resulted in a corrupted root partition, which in turn meant a mandatory reinstall from scratch.

Re: re: downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice.

[Author here]

> RH based distros (apart from Fedora)

"Aye, there's the rub."

The free ones —that is, Fedora — are very far from boring. In fact they are rather too exciting for me. Things like keeping root and home on BtrFS on a machine that's running on batteries and which I might have to shut down or suspend at any moment is *way* more excitement that I can handle at my age. And then there's the added excitement of flatpak packaging, and no long-term releases, and no proprietary drivers or firmware. Way too much "entertainment" for me.

But the real thing, the enterprise distro, costs money... Or you have to take out some form of subscription to get them for free if you only want a few machines. Or, you can run some kind of unauthorised third-party rebuild, possibly from a rival company… in which case you're running a free distro, but one that wasn't actually built by the people who are distributing it, and who therefore have very little control over its future direction.

If you need it, it's great that such things exist, and they are perfectly viable tools. I am not denigrating them. Personally I think that it is better that these projects on manage out there in the community, rather than as some kind of semi-official ostensibly generous largesse from the vendor itself.

On the other hand, a free community maintained distro is not the same thing as an enterprise distro with paid support. I would tend to feel that the ultra cautious release schedule of a supported enterprise tool, with its years old versions of the kernel and so on, aren't really what you want from a community distro.

I am dictating this, and it tends to lead to a tendency to waffle. I will cut to the chase. I think that there is arguably a happy medium to strike between ultraconservative enterprise server distros and ultramodern bleeding edge desktop distros, and I don't think that free rebuilds of RHEL are that thing.

Re: Blast from the past!

[Author here]

> Cue warm fuzzy feelings that this is still around

FreeSpire? Yes, I agree, but you are commenting on the wrong post.

I think you wanted this one?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/15/freespire-95-breezes-in/

Re: Retina does not necessarily imply fractional

[Author here]

> Retina does not imply *fractional* scaling. In fact, historically it was kinda the opposite.

I think you are misinterpreting 2 different things here: both what I meant, and the broader Apple use of the Retina term.

Apple's Retina displays originated on the phones, remember. Specifically the iPhone 4, then later the iPad, and only some years later the Mac range.

The first one I owned personally was an iPhone 6S Plus, with a 1920x1080 LCD that it runs at 730x414. That's approximately 2.6 on-screen pixels per display pixel, with very slightly different aspect ratios in the X and Y dimensions. (!)

So, I stand by my comment: the OS *needs* to support fractional scaling to handle this well. iOS doesn't even have options for it: you get what Apple thinks best. The big-screen iPad Pro has a single option: full-size or zoomed.

MacOS has more. Using a Mac with a Retina display, Apple's UI doesn't expose scaling factors directly, but they are there. What the user sees are 5 steps, from "Larger text" to "Default" to "More space".

This is as it should be, IMHO. GNOME, for instance, optionally exposes raw percentages, and on Fedora only if you enable it from the CLI. Other distros give you an on/off switch, which should not be necessary and is bad UI for a start. I have no time for excuses about "may degrade performance". GNOME 3 came out 12 years ago (Wayland 15 years) and is backed by a multi-billion-dollar corporation. Make it work, make it work *now*, and stop whinging or making excuses.

MATE drops the screen resolution, which is an awful fix. Xfce exposes a fractional scaling factor but this don't work and you have to manually enter overrides of less than one -- which *does* work but is even worse UI.

But the point is, and that is what I am getting at here, if you have more than one display, X11 cannot handle this. It does support fractional scaling but it's global and so applies to all displays. Windows is bad at this but you can set it per-display. Only macOS handles it right: one OS-wide setting and the OS makes sure that it works right across all displays, on its own with no user intervention.

What I am getting at here is not what Apple products ship with: it is that to properly support such displays, and offer a choice of text and feature sizes on screen to suit users of different ages and eyesight abilities, the display server *must* support non-integer scaling factors, which as I said X11 does not do well. I stand by that.

And secondly, to have more than one display if they are not the same DPI, it must also support non-integer scaling factors *on a per-screen basis*, on the fly, without reboots or restarts.

And ideally, without ever showing the user a percentage or a fraction or a decimal, let alone usability nightmares such as values between 0 to 1, or worse still negative numbers.

As such, I entirely stand by my summary.

You are correct in what you say, but I don't think it's especially relevant and it neglects the devices on which the tech was introduced.

[Author here]

> I have a MBP with an M1 Pro, it has 3 USB-C and is quite happy with two external screens.

Glad to hear it. Maybe the Pro reverses or undoes this limitation.

For clarity: internal screen *as well*, right? For 3 total? Otherwise we are still talking 2 max, as I said.

Re: Nope

[Author here]

> Wayland isn't the solution.

*cough*

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/25/lashcat9_linux_ui/

That, or we revive NeWS. :-)

[Author here]

> You can attach any display to an M1 mac as they have USB-C and HDMI (I have 2 dells attached to mine)

A Mac mini I guess? AIUI the laptops support just 1 external display. My MacBook air has no display output whatsoever just 2 USB-C.

So yes you can attach 3rd party displays. No, as far as I know, you cannot attach an external GPU. I think that the inability to support additional or external GPUs is the reason that Apple still sells Intel-based Mac Pros. The Apple Silicon processors are not just CPUs: they are SOCs, and the GPU and CPU are extremely closely integrated, sharing the same memory. I suspect, although nobody knows for sure yet, that there will never be external GPU support on this processor family.

Re: Nope

[Author here]

> Hope by that time it has some working remote feature.

It won't.

Seriously, it's not part of the plan, it's not a stated objective, it's not a use case for Wayland. The developers have stated that their goals are smooth tear free, high refresh rate and variable refresh rate displays, and a simplified stack for local graphics... they are not planning network support at all, and I don't think it's ever going to appear... of course, though, tools from other people may provide some kind of bolt-on but the network aspect of X11 is being discarded. So don't get your hopes up.

Re: Noooooooooo!

[Author here]

> You wrote / Liam wrote

*Thank* you!

Re: Never used!

[Author here]

> It's *not* standard IMAP access by any means, far from it. They call it 'security'

Google apps, including the free Gmail, offer standard IMAP access. Your next line gives away your mistake: it is *authentication* that is special.

It uses to offer vanilla password access, then it became an option you had to enable, then it became "app passwords" and now OAuth2 is the recommendation.

However this too is an open standard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth

T'bird supports it natively.

[Author here]

> TB does still support POP3/SMTP

SMTP is still how mail is *sent* from IMAP accounts, so yes!

I thought it was obvious and implicit that it still supported POP3, not that I use it myself. Sorry for not being clearer.

Re: Ramifications

[Author here]

You really should try Ventoy. It can do this, and it's a great deal easier. And it works in both BIOS and EFI Boot modes, so a single key will work on both BIOS and an EFI PC, including on Intel-based Macs.

And yes, it can boot DOS.

Re: Ramifications

[Author here]

> Older hardware frequently have firmware updates and profiles which can only be loaded using a manufacturer's program, which runs only under some 16-bit operating system

It's certainly used to, and until not all that long ago. However, this is increasingly untrue of any x86 hardware that is new enough to still be under guarantee.

The reason is quite simple: to carry the Microsoft Windows compatible branding, a PC has to support booting in Secure Boot mode. Secure Boot only works in EFI Boot mode. You can't have Secure Boot and have legacy boot enabled at the same time.

So, in order to support secure boot, which you need to do in order to get that window sticker and the financial incentives that go with it, there is a strong pressure on manufacturers to only support EFI Boot mode by default. That means that the BIOS compatibility mode of EFI, which is usually known as CSM, for compatibility support module I believe, is increasingly disappearing. None of the recent Lenovo machines which I have reviewed for the Register support it any longer, for example.

As it happens, I have a personal hobby side project which involves booting MS DOS from USB keys, and it saddens me that it no longer works on most modern hardware. However this is just one of the many things about the modern PC and computer industry in general which saddens me. The sad fact is that Legacy or BIOS Boot is going away armour and is already missing from any machine manufactured since the 20 teens

This is also why increasingly PCs support Windows-based firmware updates, and in turn, that has the beneficial side-effect for Linux users that Linux based firmware updates become much easier. The gnome firmware tool supports updating not only system firmware, but that of SSDs, hard disk drives, a network controllers, and so on.

So while it is true that until just a few years ago, it was useful to be able to boot many PCs from a DOS USB key in order to update their firmware, that is actually becoming rare on more current PCs where this technique no longer works at all. It's 2023. Any PC that was manufactured before the 2020s is now probably out of warranty. And that probably means that any PC which supports booting from dos is now obsolete from the point of view of the accounts department. It's been deprecated, and if you asked nicely, it's the kind of cake that you can get to keep when you leave company. So that does mean there is properly more of it out there in the secondhand channel, but the secondhand channel for PCs is not a big one because most people are unable to judge if the kit is in good condition and still works and so forth.

Re: It's about time.

[Author here]

> Pretty much everyone wants a machine that uses UEFI that boots straight into 64-bit long mode

This is true, insofar as it goes, however in order to get into the 64 bit long mode, the machine starts in 16 bit real mode, transitions to 16 bit protect mode, transitions to 32-bit protect mode, and thence into 64-bit mode.

To the best of my knowledge, on current processors, it's the only way to get there.

And while it is true that it hasn't quite equalled the IBM 360's longevity yet, X86 has come closer than anything else in history.

Re: 4 ring OS.

[Author here]

> QNX4 also used rings 1 & 2; specifically privileged items like drivers ran in ring 1; the microkernel in ring 0; normal apps and servers in ring 3.

Ahh, that is fantastic information, thank you very much! This probably explains why it is so difficult to run QNX successfully under hypervisors as well.

The late great Dan Hildebrand was of course the architect of the amazing QNX demo disc, which fitted an entire multitasking GUI OS Plus a TCP/IP stack onto a single 1.4 MB floppy disk. I very much enjoyed playing around with that in the 1990s.

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

Sadly Dan H was taken from us far too young by cancer as with so many other people...

http://onqpl.blogspot.com/2008/07/in-memoriam-dan-hildebrand_07.html

Re: A complaint about complaints

[Author here]

Or you could look at who wrote it.

Re: Another Liam's Windows rant

[Author here]

> Except Debian is not a niche distro.

Ubuntu is about 1/3 of the Linux market, as best as anyone can measure.

The various RH distros & rebuilds are 10% or so.

The rest are all down in the single digits somewhere.

> Debian comes with a tried-and-tested kernel 5.x (LTS), so it probably will have problems with latest hardware, be it the storage, GPU and such.

I am fully aware, which is why I tried it. I wanted to make and reinforce the point that this machine has some fairly leading-edge hardware and if you want to run a slow-moving, stable, that is *old* distro, this is not the machine for you.

> Perhaps Liam also used the original 2021 version of Windows 11

Please do me the credit of assuming I know what I am doing. It was the very latest 22H2 ISO available from Microsoft.

Re: Working as designed?

[Author here]

Yes, I really am asking for that. I am asking for a recovery partition which can actually recover the machine from multiple categories of boot failure, including a corrupted, damaged or missing ESP.

To my incredulity, in reading various Linux fora in recent months, I have found that some people as a matter of routine allow each Linux distribution that they installed to create its own ESP. And then they set one of those ESPs as active in order to boot the distro they want. It's also quite common to have one ESP per drive, and the installers of a number of different operating systems routinely create one ESP on every hard disk which they provision. If what is necessary for Windows repair to actually be able to start up with a missing or damaged ESP is for it to have its own separate dedicated ESP, then I would consider that as an acceptable compromise.

I have worked with Windows 8.0 and and 8.1 in the past, but not very much. I don't recall now if they automatically created a recovery partition during installation, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did. However, as far as I can tell, from the first release of Windows 10, it always does this by default unless you do not allow it created its own partitions. Frankly it seems reasonable enough to me for a new installation of Windows to search a vendor-provided or OEM recovery partition for a drivers directory and use one if it is present. And, as I said in the review, the strikes me as an easy and obvious ways of understand value to their offerings.

Re: Back to the past

[Author here]

As a personal aside, I have to say that I entirely agree with you. In fact I just recently bought a second used X220 myself, to replace the second hand one that I bought in 2017. That was a Core i5 model, and it has now been replaced with a Core i7 model. The old Core i5 machine is now running just Haiku.

Re: USB

[Author here]

> I can't remember ever needing to plug in more than one device to get me out of a hole

Well, in this particular instance, what I needed in order to get the machine back up and running was both the ability to boot from a removable medium, that is a USB key, and to simultaneously connected to a wired ethernet connection. That, it seems to me, would require two separate USB-C to USB-A converters.

Since on more than one of the machines which I have seen recently which only have two USB-C ports, they are located side-by-side, I suspect that trying to plug 2 USB-A devices into them would not have sufficient room and might well damage the ports.

That is not true on this machine, where the two USB-C ports are on opposite sides of the machine. Frankly, given the paucity of ports, that's one of the only good things about it.

Re: Bone to Pick

[Author here]

Oh I say, well played! I sit corrected.

Re: Boot issues

[Author here]

> Because you can't install Linux doesn't mean it isn't possible.

I believe that I pointed out that I successfully installed 4 different Linux distributions on this machine.

Re: Windows repair?

On this note...

Entertainingly, I just reconfigured the bootable partitions on one of my own elderly ThinkPads, since I have discovered that one of its SATA interfaces is significantly quicker (twice the speed) than the other. So I moved the bootable OS partitions onto the drive on the faster interface, and I moved the data partitions onto the drive on the slow interface. Obviously this required me to reinstall both Windows 10 and Linux' boot loaders.

While copying partitions across, I deleted the entirely useless Windows recovery partition. In the process of reinstalling the Windows boot loader, it proceeded to recreate and repopulate a brand-new rescue partition all on its own. I found this rather amusing.

[Author here]

> You shredded the Windows partition, overwrote the EFI

I think that you misunderstand. For clarity, the windows partition was completely intact and unmodified. The ESP had the windows boot files deleted, as far as I can tell, by a Linux installer, but starting Windows from a new unmodified installation USB medium, the start-up repair tool found under troubleshooting is unable to find an intact Windows partition if the relevant files are missing from the ESP.

Only the ESP had been modified. The C drive was completely unmodified. Nonetheless start-up repair was not able to even find the Windows install let alone repair it.

I consider that to be a critical failing myself, which is why I reported upon it.

Re: Reviews for the rest of us

[Author here]

I took the pricing from the current Lenovo US website. As far as I can tell, there is some sort of promotional special offer available on the UK site at the moment, which I think is not available on the US site. That is why the prices do not agree.

Re: MXLinux

[Author here]

> You might have a better chance of success with the Ryzen5-Radeon system if you used the AHS variety of MXLinux

I *did* use the advanced hardware support ISO file. That is what failed to boot on this machine.

[Author here]

Good heavens no! That wasn't the anti-Windows rant. *This* was the anti-Windows rant!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/lenovo_thinkpad_x13s_the_stealth/

For clarity, I was an early adopter of Microsoft Windows. I used, supported, and deployed in production Windows 2.01, and _every single version and every update and service pack_ from then onwards, until Windows Server 2008, which I think is the last version that I have deployed on a production machine. In the past, I have been training and/or certified as a Microsoft Exchange and Windows Server system admin.

As I am currently struggling with a broken right arm, this review was written on the Z 13 itself, using a mixture of Microsoft Wordpad, Notepad++, Panwriter and the latest release of Libreoffice, using the dictation functionality built into Windows 11.

When I criticise Windows, I do so from a position of considerable professional experience and knowledge. I have almost entirely switched over to using Linux and Apple Mac OS on the desktop *because* of 35 years' experience using Microsoft Windows, not despite it.

Re: X64 NT4

[Author here]

Erm. You *did* read the bootnote, right? You should.

Re: No

[Author here]

> I will not appreciate Freespire's ribbon-driven office suite.

Well, no, personally, me neither. However, the vast majority of people coming across from Microsoft Windows will probably know a version of Microsoft Office from the last 15 years or so, and as such that means that they will be used to a ribbon.

It seems to me that Freespire is aiming at the same sort of potential user as Linux Lite, and as such a tool such as OnlyOffice will be less intrusive and less shocking to people used to the Microsoft ecosystem than, for example, LibreOffice.

[Author here]

> it doesn't look like anything much.

I welcome correction on this, but the desktops that I have seen that undertake extensive customisation of GNOME usually either do so by forking the code, as per the example of Linux Mint, or by using in-house developed extensions. For example, Zorin OS. I've spoken to the team behind Zorin, OS, & they told me that they originally did a lot of the development work on "dash to panel", but that project is now continuing via other developers, and as far as I know the current version of the Zorin OS extensions are only available in Zorin OS itself.

In the interests of fairness, it is worth pointing out that older versions of the Zorin OS extensions are available from the GNOME extensions store, but they are not the current versions and they do not work on any current or recent version of GNOME. In fact, the versions that are on the GNOME extensions site were put there by the current maintainer and creator of the Ubuntu Cinnamon distribution.

Whereas Freespire here is using existing extensions from the GNOME extensions page, cleverly combining them to achieve a comparable degree of customisation to Mint and Zorin OS with considerably less development work. I think that's a respectable effort and that this is worthy of attention. I was not expecting a small team's relaunch of a product from some 20 years ago to be anything dramatic or impressive, and yet this was a substantially modified version of Ubuntu, and it actually works pretty well -- thus the positive review. I was actually quite impressed by what I saw.

Re: Shame really

> I lost interest when you mentioned Gnome

As it happems, I personally would agree.

However, I thinik the decision is defensible.

Like it or not, GNOME is now the most widespread Linux desktop environment among mainstream distros. It's the default in Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, and Debian. It is relatively easy to change the way that GNOME works using extensions, which are simple JavaScript programs. It is more difficult to customise KDE in ways that its developers never intended. So for a small team, using GNOME as the basis is understandable.

I would rather see them continue the efforts of Xandros, but the last extensively customised version of Xandros that I saw, was based on KD2. I don't think that that code could be adapted to or used with KDE 5 today, & to adapt it would be a substantial development project in C++. It looks to me like this modern version of Freespire is almost a one-man project, and I don't think that it's realistic for a small organisation or a solo developer to undertake major customisation of the Plasma desktop.

Re: Ubuntu Cinnamon is better looking than Kubuntu

[Author here]

> Potato, Potato.

[?]

Were you getting at the UK-versus-US to-MAR-to/to-MAY-to thing? Because we both say "potato" the same.

But that's an aside. This is the meat:

> KDE is a beautiful,

In my very humble opinion it is the ugliest mainstream desktop and has been since KDE 2.0, 23 years ago. (FWIW I wrote an article on how to build and install KDE 2.0 on Red Hat Linux at that time. I was already using it then.)

KDE 1.x was fine. Plain, unappealing, but it worked and did more than any other FOSS desktop.

KDE 2.x was a bloated mess and ugly too. Garish themes, far too complex. Corel LinuxOS and later Xandros tamed it and made it work.

KDE 3.x was just a huge pile of everyone adding their favourite features that *nobody* made work well.

The *only* company that ever made it look good was Red Hat, before RHEL or Fedora, in RHL 7/8/9 with its Bluecurve theme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve

KDE 4 took that and destroyed what little usability it had left with ridiculous "widgets" and "plasmoids" and more wastes of time copied from, of all bloody things, Windows Vista.

That is of course why Trinity happened.

KDE 5 also leaps aboard the nearest passing fashion train by adopting a flat theme. That at least tamed the fugly (not just ugly but "effing" + ugly) themes, taking it from "oh my gods I would rather use braille than look at this" to "my eyes hurt".

It is *horrible* and it's got worse over the last 25 years.

GNOME is poorly functional, poorly implemented, & wastes screen space, but the _graphic design_ is immaculate, the best in the industry.

> configurable desktop

Only if you don't know how to use a Windows-95-stylke desktop. It is terrible at vertical taskbars, poor at window controls, poor at useful innovative features.

I want a vertical panel with horizontal contents. Instead I get a GIANT START BUTTON whose size I can't control.

I want tabbed title bars, like BeOS. Or better still, ones on the side, like wm2 and dwm. I do not want anything rendered as HTML outside my web browsers. I want proper desktop folders and zero plasmoids or widgets. I want to completely disable Javascript everywhere and have my desktop 100% functional.

If I must have a horizontal taskbar, I want it to span both screens. KDE up to 4 did that.

KDE 5 removed it. Too hard to implement.

What do we get instead? A floating panel taskbar. FFS.

IT IS YOUR *JOB* PEOPLE. IT WAS ALREADY THERE. DO NOT REMOVE USEFUL FUNCTIONALITY AND ADD USELESS CHROME.

(P.S. Anyone who wants to start arguing about "well actually plasma is the desktop" can die in a fire right along with the "actually it is gnu + linux" folks.)

I want seamless integration with Gtk 1, 2, 3, 4, EFL, FLTK and every other toolkit and I don't want to know what a toolkit is. Make it all look the same or die in a fire.

It is not configurable unless you want the same config as some KDE dev who doesn't know how to use Windows properly.

For a desktop that is a ripoff of Windows 98 "Active Desktop" -- the worst desktop version ever -- this is inexcusable.

> with a great selection of default apps.

They are a messy inconsistent collection of half implemented nonsense. Some have version numbers, some have release dates. Some have two -- *TWO** -- help/about panels, *neither* with a version number. Some have menu bars, some have hamburger menus. Is there a global option to disable that? Of course there isn't.

None are best of breed. All the best of breed Linux apps are Gtk based: Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, Skype, LibreOffice.

LibreOffice is StarOffice. That was German. KDE was originally German too. SUSE is German.

SLE no longer includes KDE. StarOffice did not integrate with KDE. StarOffice originally implemented its own Start menu and file explorer.

These things should tell you something.

Apparently it did not, because what followed were divorces between the desktop and the accessories, and the desktop and the office suite.

> Cinnamon has a collection of Apps that look like a Fisher-Price My First Computer from the 90s.

Wrong. It doesn't have apps at all.

On Ubuntu it uses GNOME apps. That's fair: they are the distro's defaults. It *ought* to use the MATE accessories but the remixes are all unofficial and do not cooperate much. The developer of Ubuntu Cinnamon is so young he is still at school. In full time education, he only has so much time. I cut him some slack on that basis.

On most distros Cinnamon uses distro defaults.

Mint uses their own X-Apps, which are shared by 3 desktops: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. This is smart.

The X-apps have traditional UIs with menu bars. If someone wants a traditional desktop they probably want that. It is smart. Do other distros learn? They do not.

KDE's devs even fell out with their own office suite team and Calligra has gone its own way. The Gear apps suite has its own different release schedule. This is an indication of the total lack of coherency across the KDE ecosystem.

The existence of Trinity and LXQt (and formerly the Katana fork of KDE 4) also demonstrate and illustrate perfectly this incoherence.

No. I do not merely disagree with every line of your comment, I disagree with every individual noun phrase and every adjective.

KDE and its apps is an ugly, poorly-functional, clunky, incoherent, inconsistent mess, and every version gets worse.

I have not even mentioned the keyboard controls or the accessibility or the poor mismatched functionality between X.org and Wayland. This was the short version.

Re: Stop the KDE and Gnome trains, I want to get off

[Author here]

> Can anybody recommend a distro which comes with a nice Xfce theme and the software is written with Xfce in mind?

100% agree. Xfce is the only WM that isn't wasting time and effort on useless bling these days. Including LXQt IMHO.

Don't mind systemd? Want max compatibility?

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/13/zinc_ubuntu_remix/

Don't want systemd either?

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/31/mx_linux_212/

[Author here]

> so that I can install a system by adding, rather than subtracting, packages.

Good plan. There's a need for things like this.

There are efforts in that direction, though. AntiX is weird and I find it difficult, but it does work.

Re: "...haven't been very impressed by any of them."

[Author here]

Yes, I have written about the Hello System as well:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/hellosystem_08/

I could not get it to install on bare metal, though, and for some reason, the dock has been dropped from recent releases.

Re: Free VMS 1.0 for VAX

[Author here]

> Or you could get a community license for alpha and run the latest version of VMS on AXPBox.

The latest version of VMS is 9.x and it is Intel-only.

AFAIK, Alpha support tops out at 8.x and the last few point releases in the 8.x series were Itanium only.

So Alpha support is not the latest: it's _two_ releases behind $CURRENT.