Slashdot Mirror

Here's just a brief search for personal supercomputers of days gone (not too far) by. Most if not all are cheaper than the SGI. Being older they may not stack up spec-wise, and the definition will always be changing anyway. More than one claim to be 'first', and to SGI's credit they only claim it's 'their' first.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/23/068234

http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?fID=569&rID=4263

http://aslab.com/products/workstations/marquisk942.html

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/06/07/tyan_unveils_typhoon/

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Cray_Unveils_Personal_Supercomputer.html

Yeah, this is true.

However, you can also buy a Linux Desktop with all that stuff *already* setup.

http://www.aslab.com/products/workstations/uni_wor kstations.html

Still significantly cheaper than a Mac. Keep in mind, I'm saying this, and I *own* macs. I'm typing this from my powerbook, which I like very much (ideal portable system).

Infact, you can buy a preconfigured SuSE desktop workstation with dual dual-core Opterons for $3100. This includes a gig of ram and a 3 year warranty. This setup will blow *any* Mac rig out of the water.

Its still difficult to justify the price for tasks where Linux software can do the job. My Macs are for Adobe work. When Adobe releases Creative Suite for Linux, I'll probably be finished with the Mac, except for portables, perhaps, since the hardware is of such high quality.

If you don't want to bugger around with all those things, get a preconfigured Linux desktop. That's what you buy when your getting a Mac.

Difficult of install in regards to Linux in no way relates to the difficulty of setting up a Macintosh box.

Walmart sells machines made by Linare that don't come with MS Windows in any form.

Linspire has a list of retail partners that sell Linux PCs.

Laptops? Shit out of luck unless you want to pay a lot more.

Walmart sells a laptop with Linspire on it for $498.
Linare laptops start at $498.
Linux Certified laptops start at $999.
ASL has a sweet laptop for $1661.

Walmart sells machines made by Linare that don't come with MS Windows in any form.

Linspire has a list of retail partners that sell Linux PCs.

Laptops? Shit out of luck unless you want to pay a lot more.

Walmart sells a laptop with Linspire on it for $498.
Linare laptops start at $498.
Linux Certified laptops start at $999.
ASL has a sweet laptop for $1661.

I've had better luck with asl, although one machine from them did ship with this weird problem with a loose IDE cable where /hda would randomly disappear every few weeks.

Geez, maybe I should just be buying Dells...

First of all, this is exactly what IBM is doing , targeting the high end of the spectrum. Particularly Linux on Mainframes and what not. There is a huge market in the corporate world for high end Linux computing, in part replacing Unix mainframes.

But also there are several vendors of High end Linux Workstations. Folks like ASL, PogoLinux, Micronux and the list goes on. Here the market niche is scientific/tech workstations, and yes, they are typically high end.

The market that is still not ripe for High end Linux workstations is the power gamer home PC, and this is the one probably holding WalMart, HP and others back on high end Linux PCs

aslab
I'm currently buying linux servers from them, but I saw that they also have laptops

You should realize though that most of these companies purchase the hardware from companies like Sager (Linux forum) and Compal, and those companies also supply the big-name guys like Compaq, HP, Dell, and Toshiba. So when you find some no-name laptop, it is usually equivalent to some branded laptop that never touched the hands of HP/Compaq/Toshiba/Dell. (And figuring out exactly *which* brand-name laptop it is equivalent to can be extremely difficult) Some of the below claim to manufacture their own notebooks, but what this means is that they buy them from Saeger/Compal or someone else, and put in a hard drive/CPU/RAM, which is why you will find identical looking cases at several of these vendors.

If you find a HP/Compaq/Toshiba/Dell/IBM/Sony branded laptop that has linux preinstalled, it means that the vendor paid for windows and removed it. I do not list them below because I think this is a despicable and deceptive practice. These manufacturers do not (yet) sell no-os or linux laptops. (But please, call them and ask!! The squeaky wheel gets the grease!) Also if you order a no-OS laptop, please request linux to be installed anyway, and tell them you'll pay for it! Let them know there is demand!

1. Linux-preinstalled laptops
2. ASA Computers
3. ASLab (Linux Forum)
4. American Computer
5. Cyclox
6. Kachina Tech (positively ancient laptops -- K6 and PII)
7. QLI Tech
8. Workstation 2000

1. No-os laptops
2. ARM Computer
3. Chem USA
4. Mtech Laptops (these guys outright lied to me about what they could deliver, in order to get my order, were not able to deliver the laptop, and I had to cancel my order -- which took 3 months to process and they kept $5 for the priviledge -- do not do business with them)
5. PC Torque
6. Power Notebooks (very good customer service according to Reseller Ratings) (Linux forum)
7. Xtreme Notebooks

-- Bob

You should realize though that most of these companies purchase the hardware from companies like Sager (Linux forum) and Compal, and those companies also supply the big-name guys like Compaq, HP, Dell, and Toshiba. So when you find some no-name laptop, it is usually equivalent to some branded laptop that never touched the hands of HP/Compaq/Toshiba/Dell. (And figuring out exactly *which* brand-name laptop it is equivalent to can be extremely difficult) Some of the below claim to manufacture their own notebooks, but what this means is that they buy them from Saeger/Compal or someone else, and put in a hard drive/CPU/RAM, which is why you will find identical looking cases at several of these vendors.

If you find a HP/Compaq/Toshiba/Dell/IBM/Sony branded laptop that has linux preinstalled, it means that the vendor paid for windows and removed it. I do not list them below because I think this is a despicable and deceptive practice. These manufacturers do not (yet) sell no-os or linux laptops. (But please, call them and ask!! The squeaky wheel gets the grease!) Also if you order a no-OS laptop, please request linux to be installed anyway, and tell them you'll pay for it! Let them know there is demand!

1. Linux-preinstalled laptops
2. ASA Computers
3. ASLab (Linux Forum)
4. American Computer
5. Cyclox
6. Kachina Tech (positively ancient laptops -- K6 and PII)
7. QLI Tech
8. Workstation 2000

1. No-os laptops
2. ARM Computer
3. Chem USA
4. Mtech Laptops (these guys outright lied to me about what they could deliver, in order to get my order, were not able to deliver the laptop, and I had to cancel my order -- which took 3 months to process and they kept $5 for the priviledge -- do not do business with them)
5. PC Torque
6. Power Notebooks (very good customer service according to Reseller Ratings) (Linux forum)
7. Xtreme Notebooks

-- Bob

I have bought prebuilt Linux systems from Penguin Computing and ASL with success.

If the people don't know how to run a server, I'd go with Red Hat and subscribe to Red Hat's automatic security update program. Make sure they use one of the user-friendly tools to turn off all the stuff they don't need, though.

If that's not enough, they should probably just hire somebody to help them. A custom off-the-shelf system is a contradiction in terms; if you want something a little different than everybody else, then you can't just open the box and plug it in: cash or elbow grease is required.

it would be from these guys.

I get my computers from ASL, and so do my employers, so I've dealt with a number of their machines. They do Linux laptops, and will not charge you for Windows on a Linux-only system.

Try here.

This company took over sales for the now-no-retail-sales Tuxtops, where I got my laptop (the Chembook-made Tuxtop branded Dell Inspiron 5000) a couple years back.

Looks like they may still be using the Chembook/Dell form factors. Nice machines, and they come with RedHat installed.

My "5000" runs FreeBSD now, and perfectly: sound, APM, hot-plug USB mouse and all.

When I built mine, I figure that I about made wages, IF I compared the cost of the box I built to the cost of a similar machine, ready-made. The key word here is similar! Dell doesn't make non-intel machines, and I wanted athlon, both for the floatingpoint and for general bang-for-the-buck. I wanted to spend lots on ram, and little on cpu. Hard to get what you want with Dell; they sell you what THEY want. I put in ram that runs reliably with two waitstates, and the motherboard lets me run it that way. Can't get that from Dell.

Finding similar computers isn't easy, but look here, and here. HP's stuff is close, but uses pentium 4, which I don't like. The similar products don't start at $499, or even $899. I figured that a year ago, when I spent $800 building mine, it would have cost about $1100 to buy something comparable from one of the suppliers of linux workstations (with no monitor). That's roughly $300 savings. That came partly because I was able to get exactly what I wanted, partly because I took advantage of specials and partly because I already had a really nice monitor, keyboard, mouse, et cetera. That $300 or so paid for about 15 hours of shopping, ordering, assembling and installing. I'd bill my time considerably higher than that, but this was fun, so it was ok.

Here's my shortlist of vendors who preload Linux on laptops:

• Advanced Systems Labs
• Southwest Technologies

I encourage other posters to add to the list.

try here.

I've got a Dell Inspiron 5000 as my laptop - but I didn't buy it from Dell - I got it from TuxTops (when they still sold hardware. Sigh.)

You can get the Inspiron 5000 form factor from ASL with a 1400x1050 screen currently. Their model is the Excalibur LT-420.

Looks like TuxTops moved their hardware sales to QLITech, where you can get the same thing.

Both the ASL and the TuxTops machines are relabeled ChemBooks, which Dell still uses for some of the Inspiron line.

I've got a Dell Inspiron 5000 as my laptop - but I didn't buy it from Dell - I got it from TuxTops (when they still sold hardware. Sigh.)

You can get the Inspiron 5000 form factor from ASL with a 1400x1050 screen currently. Their model is the Excalibur LT-420.

Looks like TuxTops moved their hardware sales to QLITech, where you can get the same thing.

Both the ASL and the TuxTops machines are relabeled ChemBooks, which Dell still uses for some of the Inspiron line.

If Dell replaces people who actually know Linux, it will be a tragedy indeed.

Originally, Sun support denied the problem existed, even after a Sun VP talked about it in an interview.

I've had far better luck with hardware quality and overall stability using Athlon servers running NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The system vendors I've used are ASLab at http://www.aslab.com/ and Rackmount.Com at http://www.rackmount.com/

Specs are:

ASLab systems - 850 Mhz Athlon ASLab's choice of RAM in two systems, Mushkin in one. Asus K7M motherboard Adaptec 39160 Ultra160 SCSI Two of the systems are connected to an external SCSI-> SCSI RAID, using an Infortrend SCSI->RAID module. The cabinet was built by Enhance Technology - http://www.enhance-tech.com/

Rackmount.Com system: 1.2GHz Athlon, Asus A7V motherboard, Rackmount.Com's choice of RAM, Mylex RAID controller.

All systems use IBM SCSI Ultra160 drives.

None have experienced OS crashes or hardware failures since being put into production under moderate to heavy load.

That said, I've had generally good results with lower-end Sun systems. Eg., E450's, Netras, etc. But, Sun's main advantage is the ability to scale, and integrate with things such as Veritas Volume Manager / File System / Cluster server. So it doesn't make much sense at low-end. For web servers, application servers, mail servers and DNS servers, for instance, network-based load balancers or inherent robustness of the protocol provide more usefulness for failure masking and availability.

Hard Drives: You must buy the machine with a Quantum Atlas SCA disk.

Now, we buy lots of Seagate SCA disks well in advance, so we wanted to use what we already own, not to mention that we've found Quantum drives to be very unreliable (they died too often). So, we just wanted machines with no disks. Not possible with VA.

Drive sleds: VA was very reluctant to send us empty disk rails for use in futute disks that we may add as needed. They wanted to sell a Quantum drive with it. They ultimately allowed this but they gave us a much bigger hassle over this than they should have. We should be allowed to buy whatever drive we want.

Anyway, we now buy our systems from AS Labs which sport nicer cases (made by Intel) and none of the hassles (they ship with 4 bare drive chassis by default! What a concept!)

Some other good points of ASLab is that they'll also build systems (including rackmount) with Athlon CPU's, which, along with price, was a critical factor in my choosing them.

Check them out at http://www.aslab.com if these are the sorts of things you're interested in. :)

Athlon K7 OEM Solution
The ASUS K7M and K7M-RM is equipped with 200MHz FSB, 3x DIMM, UDMA/66, and optional Health Monitoring and 2 additional USB ports.

http://www.asus.com.tw/Produ cts/Motherboard/index.html

Interestingly, when you click on the K7M / K7M-RM the cpu connection button bar adds "Slot A" as an entry. ;)

I have been on an AMD/Asus buying spree lately. I got my g/f an Asus P5A motherboard for her K6-2 and have built a webserver with K6-2 & Asus P5A. These machines have done quite well in relatively different applications - the webserver has been going non-stop for 243 days (running FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE), and my g/f's workstation doesn't have any hardware issues with its wealth of toys. Eg., Hauppauge WinTV 401, Buslogic Multimaster SCSI controlling a Plextor 40X Max CD-ROM (which utterly and completely rocks), and Yamaha 4416 SCSI CD-RW. For some reason the FIC PA-2013 the system had before was unhappy about having the Buslogic controller and IDE drives on the primary controller. Smooth sailing in all cases w/ the ASUS P5A, though.

Also, I'm currently in the specification stage for 2 rackmount Athlon servers. After dealing with vendors to get the Athlon machines set up, I can tell you - it is *not* easy to find higher-end configurations with Athlon. Fortunately, the good people at ASL, Inc. have been very helpful. In fact, they were the first vendor I saw meaningfully demonstrate Athlons (when I was lucky enough to attend Atlanta Linux Showcase last year). If you're looking to build an Athlon server, check them out. They're cool. Tell them ninjaz sent you. ;)

ASL Workstations

• Penguin Computing
• VA Linux Systems
• ASL Workstations
• IBM

The first three companies are pure Linux. The fourth is getting good advice on Linux systems from people in the community.

You absolutely want as little variation on your hardware as possible with these machines. This will up the price of each machine. However, it will also make them easier to maintain, repair, upgrade and find drivers for. The additional expense pays off in the long run, if you are going to deploy thousands of these things. Make this a condition of your contract.

Personally, I say go with ASL, if only because they're nice guys.

NB- I don't work for any of these companies, even (as far as I know) indirectly.