On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Dylan William Hardison wrote:
> I'd like some pointers for building a cheap-ish system, that can run
> GNU/Linux with no problems.
Second-hand components are a lot cheaper, but don't have a warranty.
Older or cheaper-but-new NICs or sound cards or video cards are often
better supported than rarer or more expensive kinds, due to their
ubiquity.
Avoid the fastest CPU, best video card, largest HD; often those cost quite
a bit more than the next-in-line; more than would be expected for their
speed/performance/size.
IDE hard drives are cheaper than SCSI, but they're internal only. Some
hard drives are available with a USB interface, but motherboards that can
boot from a USB device are few and far between.
Motherboards with onboard {sound,video,network,SCSI} hardware are
available, and it's often cheaper to get one of them as opposed to getting
a motherboard _and_ a bunch of cards, but support in non-Windows OSes is
iffy. And, of course, you may not get the features you want. Check the
ALSA matrix http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ and the XFree86 matrix
http://xfree.org/current/Status.html for support of considered cards.
I'm not going to get into the AMD vs Intel holy war.
I've had good luck with:
Asus A7V266 & A7V333 motherboards
SoundBlaster AWE32, CMI 8738, SoundBlaster Live! sound cards (well, the
CMI was onboard, but I didn't like it so I kept the SBL)
Intel 486/66, Celeron/400, AMD Duron 950, Athlon 1800+, Athlon 2400+ CPUs
3Com 3c509, D-Link DFE-530Tx+ NICs
Elsa Synergy II-16 (nVidia Riva TNT2) video card
> Any particular hardware vendors to avoid?
Anything that's not listed as supported by XFree86 or by ALSA. Some of
the Asus boards (including mine... grr) aren't supported by lm_sensors
because Asus won't release their specs.
-- -eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactarHi! I'm a .sig virus! Copy me to your .sig!
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