Minor historical footnote: HP paid Progeny (Ian Murdock's company he founded years after creating Debian) to help port Debian packages to Itanium. They gave us a first-generation computer, which was epically slow of course.

That contract helped keep Progeny alive after the venture capital funding dried up; the company's original plan was to allow customers to reboot their Windows desktop computers overnight to run as a distributed Linux supercomputer.

Gentoo also has instructions. Linux/ia64 works fine for the most part, it's not an architecture that causes much drama for userspace applications.

Servers are cheap on ebay and the older Intel boards (also sold by Dell, Fujitsu,..) can be upgraded to newer CPUs that are either less power hungry or faster with more cores and sort-of HT. HP are generally not upgrade-able and SGI/ia64 is a special case with lots of other custom hardware as usual.

Annoyingly many Linux / gcc developers want to remove ia64 support from their source trees because the architecture is no longer commercially relevant.

As a necrocomputing enthusiast it's quite sad, but not much one can do about.

If only this old junk was as popular as the various homecomputers...

Note at a kernel level it's now marked as orphaned. It also seems to just get random regressions, because nobody actually tests it.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Or...