So you bought yourself a spiffy new, lightning fast Alpha system from Digital, and you've installed Linux on it. Now you find to your dismay that while there's an awful lot of good software starting to appear for Linux, an awful lot of it is in binary-only form for x86-based systems. No Alpha version, no Sparc version, no PowerPC version... the market is just not there yet, says the vendor. Well, for Alpha systems at least there is an answer: EM86. EM86 is an emulator that allows you to run Linux/Intel programs on Linux/Alpha. It does this by emulating the x86 instruction set and by providing a runtime environment that mimics what a running Linux/Intel program would expect to see.
The following links describe EM86 in more detail: