Recommend a dist for ALPHA.

i recently got 2 Alpha workstations (433au), running Digital Unix.
one boots fine (at least to the part when it tries to update via NTP, then sits there because it's not on a network yet), and the other one fails booting, and sits at some kind of initial boot stage (i think it's just a bad installation). if anyone here's proficient with digital unix and/or alphas, i'll expand on the problem.

anyway, not knowing anything about alphas, firstly, can someone direct me to some sort of a "n00bs guide" anywhere? namely, i'm interested in their equivalent of a BIOS menu (do they have one?), and basic configuration settings.

i'm proficient enough with linux (suse and ppc-embedded-debian), and i've used unix (i assume Sun-OS) on Sunray terminals before, but never installed, configured, or generally played with.

if i have to install something new, can someone recommend me a distro to use? i'm currently downloading a gentoo-iso, the only one i could find on my local mirror, they didn't have free/net/openbsd isos (i get free downloads from there, if i have to get something from the wider internet, it'll have to wait for a few weeks, i'm nearly at my dl quota already)
just suggest something nice, i don't care what, i just want to play around with it for a few weeks, if i can get it working i might turn them into web and/or fileservers, but later.

cheers
Doc C