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As far as "not buying the products", you tell me where to buy a Windows-free PC and I'll run there; oh wait, you guys are harassing white-box shops that do that, and you certainly won't be able to get one from the major companies like Compaq, HP, Dell, etc.

Some Dell models can be ordered preloaded with Linux

Look at:
dell.com/linux
compaq.com/linux
hp.com/linux
etc.

Anyone remember that Tomshardware article?, Dissecting Rambus, I think the ocassion deserves to remember it, specially the High-bandwidth Misinformation. 'Love will make you do things that you know is wrong': "Dell is perhaps the world's largest manufacturer of personal computers. Dell is also widely considered closely wedded to Intel. On the computer titan's site, the speed of the RDRAM used in its systems is difficult to find and, for the typical consumer, difficult to interpret. After drilling down to the RDRAM specifications for the Dell XPS B, the computer giant provides information that is not only misleading, but also simply false. Dell boasts that "RDRAM provides up to 1.6 GB/sec of memory bandwidth versus only 800 MB/sec with conventional SDRAM," but elsewhere on this page the frequency of the RDRAM used in the system is stated at 356 MHz. As already explained in this article, this indicates in an indirect way that the system is equipped with the slower PC700 RDRAM which will never reach a bandwidth of 1.6 GB/sec. Also on this page Dell states correctly that the bus width for its RDRAM systems is 16 bits, but IT ALSO STATES THAT SDRAM'S BUS WIDTH IS ONLY 8 BITS when, as you already know, SDRAM has a 64-bit bus. Incorrect at best, misleading at worst, Dell should be harshly criticized for providing this disservice to its customers. In light of other misinformation currently surrounding RDRAM, Dell's actions are cast in an unfavorable light."

Of course you can. www.dell.com/linux

Benefits of Serial ATA
Serial ATA offers a number of benefits over Parallel ATA, including:

• Reductions in voltage and pin count
• Smaller, easier-to-route cables; elimination of the cable-length limitation
• Improved data robustness
• Backward compatibility

Voltage Reduction
Serial ATA's low-voltage requirement (500 millivolts [mV] peak-to-peak) will effectively alleviate the increasingly difficult-to-accommodate 5-volt signaling requirement that hampers the current Parallel ATA interface.

Cabling
The Serial ATA architecture replaces the wide Parallel ATA ribbon cable with a thin, flexible cable that can be up to 1 meter in length. The serial cable is smaller and easier to route inside the chassis (see Figure 2). The small-diameter cable can help improve air flow inside the PC system chassis and will facilitate future designs of smaller PC systems.

Improved Data Robustness
Serial ATA will offer more thorough error checking and error correcting capabilities than are currently available with Parallel ATA. The end-to-end integrity of transferred commands and data can be guaranteed across the serial bus.

Backward Compatibility
Serial ATA will provide backward compatibility for legacy Parallel ATA and ATAPI devices.

Benefits of Serial ATA
Serial ATA offers a number of benefits over Parallel ATA, including:

• Reductions in voltage and pin count
• Smaller, easier-to-route cables; elimination of the cable-length limitation
• Improved data robustness
• Backward compatibility

Voltage Reduction
Serial ATA's low-voltage requirement (500 millivolts [mV] peak-to-peak) will effectively alleviate the increasingly difficult-to-accommodate 5-volt signaling requirement that hampers the current Parallel ATA interface.

Cabling
The Serial ATA architecture replaces the wide Parallel ATA ribbon cable with a thin, flexible cable that can be up to 1 meter in length. The serial cable is smaller and easier to route inside the chassis (see Figure 2). The small-diameter cable can help improve air flow inside the PC system chassis and will facilitate future designs of smaller PC systems.

Improved Data Robustness
Serial ATA will offer more thorough error checking and error correcting capabilities than are currently available with Parallel ATA. The end-to-end integrity of transferred commands and data can be guaranteed across the serial bus.

Backward Compatibility
Serial ATA will provide backward compatibility for legacy Parallel ATA and ATAPI devices.

says that linux demand isn't big enough to justify
support, but if there was demand, Dell would market linux more...

his mailing list post is here

I have never seen a order page that gives a choice between Linux and Windows on the configuration screen. I'd love for someone to show me a URL to prove me wrong...

Go the the server machines and select a 1650. Then customize. Hopefully this link will take you right there. http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp? customer_id=04&keycode=6W300&order_code=PE1650

Take a look at www.dell.com/linux. Dell started selling Linux on Servers and has never stopped. Can you clarify how Dell has ignored the server market? Maybe I am missing something here. They are one of the few OEM's that has an email list. That gives direct access to many of the engineers that are making sure that Dell server and Red Hat work well together. You can also get "Dell's Custom Solutions" for an extra fee that will install any distribution on your machine, even your own images. This obviously won't be supported as if you went with one of the tested and approved ones.

Take a look at www.dell.com/linux. Dell started selling Linux on Servers and has never stopped. Can you clarify how Dell has ignored the server market? Maybe I am missing something here. They are one of the few OEM's that has an email list. That gives direct access to many of the engineers that are making sure that Dell server and Red Hat work well together. You can also get "Dell's Custom Solutions" for an extra fee that will install any distribution on your machine, even your own images. This obviously won't be supported as if you went with one of the tested and approved ones.

While I didn't write my government official, I did write an email to Dell directly. Enough emails, and it might actually make a difference. You can contact Dell here: http://support.dell.com/us/en/dellcare/segtopic_cc are_nav_notlisted_ccare.asp

And my email:

I've been a loyal Dell customer since I bought my first Dell PC, used, from a friend. The machine was already several years old, but it kept on kicking... and after nearly 10 years, now runs SuSE Linux as a great sever for me.

I was so happy to see Dell selling PCs with Linux some time ago, but have disturbed by rumors floating around that Dell didn't like selling Linux boxes. "There isn't enough demand." "They don't make enough money." etc. Despite the lack of immediate demand, I believe that as large PC companies start to push the option more agressively, Linux will indeed make it onto more and more desktops. I hear stories every day about small companies, schools, and government agencies opting not to upgrade Windows PCs to the next iteration of Microsoft's Operating System. Instead, they use older machines and Linux to run their day to day operations. Imagine if they had the choice to purchase new machines, with 1-3 year service and support, WITHOUT Windows installed. $350 / machine. All there needs to be is a PC maker willing to stand up to Microsoft's influence and work to make the industry more competitive and provide better choices for consumers.

Thank you for your time, and I hope that you consider the social ramifications of the decisions that Dell makes as well as the economic and financial considerations.

--Paul

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/19/0516 24 3&mode=thread&tid=98

P.S. I really love my new Dimension 4300 1.6 GHz machine. :) VERY nice case!

Sony comes close to looking good, until you realize the MX model (shown) starts at $2700. The other Sony computers are just the standard "beige-with-color-tints" which are popular with PC manufacturers now -- their half-effort imitation of Apple's first iMac.

I did find it a little strange in Showtime that they looped the PowerBook G4 ad on that TV set about three or four times, though. ;)

Wow, comparing this to my Dell Latitude.. Look at how far we've come! Of course, the Dell laptop would be much easier to steal given it's smaller size. I think your Osborne 1 would be safe, you could even leave it lying around and nobody would touch it!

This test image was displayed in the same video mode as before (VESA 640 x 480@85Hz).

I'd be interested in seeing the results from the same experiment, except with a framed Despair, Inc. poster hanging on an old-skool-Mac beige or old-skool-iMac blue wall, with funky Star Trek red alert lighting (or disco lights too), and two 17" monitors at 1600 x 1200 side by side, with a third 15" montior running some spiffy Winamp visualization at 1024 x 768 to the left ome, and a funky Sharper Image thing glowing on the desk.

Or you can just do the experiment at 1280 x 1024.

Turbyne
"Guys cry over cars; men cry over boats, but real men cry over guns." - unknown

a well written C program can be as portible as Java.

Not if you want to use advanced OS features such as sockets or a GUI and the most common workstation operating system on the most common consumer workstation doesn't support POSIX well, let alone X11. Or are you talking about emulating POSIX on a winbox (that is, the opposite of WINE)?

Java code is not native

Bull. GCJ can compile Java language source code to a native binary using the same code generator G++ uses. Granted, you do lose a bit of performance to the GC thread.

These PERC RAID cards are not known for their speed. We have been discussing the speed issues on the Dell List Serve located at http://lists.us.dell.com. Many people have said that software based RAID is much much faster. Though most of our speed problems are related to the linux kernel, specifically the Adaptec brand of controllers, a software based approach has some high points to it. Remember that the processor on that RAID card is no where near the speed of your CPU's. You take a bit of a performance hit, but if your server sits idle most of the time, look into it.

Icewalker

A few corrections...

So to build a filesystem that's 18 million TB big, you'd have to commandeer all hard drive production, worldwide, for about 12 years.

Isn't true: HDD capacity is growing at (at least) ~60% PER YEAR. Even with the conservative figures here (HD size for 2002 given as 36Gb), that means selling average home user drives of 1.5 Tb in 2010 (starting from 60Gb disks in 2002, you come up with 2.5Tb disks in 2010).

The UCB site manages to grasp that in general, the conceptual failure is to imagine that there is some linearity in information growth. There isn't. Chart anything you like in this area and the graph will be a big sqr(x) type of affair with a scary looking rate of growth at the end. Hold on tight! As the UCB site says "shipments of digital magnetic storage are essentially doubling every year" doubling!

Q. What does every extra bit in an address give you?
A. Double the address space.
Q. How many more bits are there in 64 bit addressing from 32?
A. 32 bits
Q. Which means...?
A. We have 32 years until we're back to where we are today regarding information size vs addressing space.

Oh yeah, 32 years is a real long time. Y2K anyone?

Of course, this fact fails to address your basic premise, which seems to be that assigning unique integer addresses to every byte that a computer can access would be a reasonable thing to do.

I think you misread me. I dont advocate the need to be able to mmap the web; but local devices? Surely. this has been a problem in 32bits for a long time. There's nothing magic about 64bits. It's just bigger. It too will fall.

And your last comment about cache misses! Are you joking? If you need more than 64bits of space it doesn't matter how much better a 64bit address system cache would work because it can't do the job. Even with the "cache misses", a >64bit system is infinitly faster because it will work. If you need the space, you need the space.

0.02

Personally, I think Microsoft should not have been prosecuted for negotiating contracts in their favor. Who cares? As long as no one is forced to buy their product.

Er, yes. But exactly there lies the problem. When I founded my company a couple years ago I was on the lookout for a server. Guess what: I was forced to buy their product with any fscking available option, safe for assembling it myself. Sure, I forked out the xx$ for Windoze '98 and grinded my teeth.

A year later I get a laptop. Do you really imply there was any way to avoid being forced to pay Microsoft licensing fees. Sure, a major manufacturer had a "Linux option", which consisted of a two years old clunker with no configurability, whatsover.

Of course you may argue, it's the manufacturers fault for not supplying more options. But this also doesn't quite cut it. There are quite credible rumours (since those OEM contracts are aparently declared trade secrets), that the good boys from Redmond just cut off your air supply in form of much higher licensing fees, which essentially kill your business, if you indeed offer a credible alternative.

Oh, and the fact that only Recovery CD's (yeah, right! recovery) are shipeed with those machines, which disables a double boot unless you cough up umpteen hundred bucks for a retail version didn't really do much to calm my anger.

The problem is not that Microsoft is a monopolly, the problem (as acknowledged by the courts, btw) is the abuse of this monopoly power in order to kill competition.

Hopefully Steven won't be around for the occasion.

As far as I can tell, Dell is still selling Linux systems in both workstations and servers. (www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/linux_000_linux_pro ducts.htm)

hopefully intel will reduce the size of this thing so the big three can get it into laptops that aren't the size (and weight) of a sack of this.

i don't believe the laptop market is filled to the brim with people who wear back-supports.

Also, a correction on the story, you can still buy a Dell with Linux, Dell was just pragmatic enough to realize that Linux is currently a great choice for servers, but doesn't make sense for the desktop today.

Unfortunately, checking their website shows that only business machines will have a Linux option; home machines are still WinXP only."

As has been said before, Dell is still offering linux on their machines for business and server applications as well. Both Dell and HP have realized that linux is not quite ready for the home desktop, and quite rightly so.

Dell is still installing Redhat on its servers/workstations.

here is a link.

Dude, you're getting a dell! Only $900 for a smoking x86 system (plus maybe $40 for a 256 meg stick of ram), xp and ms works suite, everything else that *I* need, I can get free, sans games.

Don't get me wrong, I love mac hardware. I love the idea of controlled hardware and an OS tuned to it. (I always used to be an Amiga man up until I found out I was missing out on doom2. :), but you're kidding yourself when you say it's not expensive. For instance if my CPU is too slow, I can buy a new mobo for $100, new cpu for $150, and maybe new ram for $60, now I have myself a PC that's now with the times. Anyway, what were we talking about? :)

Oh yes, full blown Office Suites and how expesive they are compared to the OS. Damn it would be nice if everyone just would settle for notepad/wordpad. :)

This is the link I got my info from: http://www.dell.com/html/us/segments/dhs/compare.h tm

Here is the near top of the line dell system I'm able to purchase for $1759 shipped. This includes a 2ghz pentium 3, 256 megs of ram, dvd, cd burner, 80 gig hard drive and 64 megs geoforce 2mx w/17 in monitor.

Here is a 933mhz Mac with 80 gig HD, 256 megs of ram, radeon 7500, and a superdrive for $2600. This unit has no monitor but does come with a superdrive.

"Dell is now shipping Red Hat® Linux 7.2 and 7.1 on PowerEdge Servers and Precision Workstations!!"

Why would you buy something like this when you can get a notebook that is faster, quieter, cheaper, smaller, and more power efficient for half the price from Dell?

Maybe the article explains more, but it seems to be /.'ed.

The price? $7,999 at the time.

hmmm... beginning to suspect you have no idea what you're talking about. it was hard getting past the hard-as-nails part. i have a new computer in my lab right now that won't install win2k and is locked up in the (default) install process where it thinks it's already installed but it really isn't.

Anecdotal points about specific hardware combinations failing to install/run a specific OS that fail to mention that the combination is in fact supported by the OS developer are rather worthless. For example, I have a particular model of IBM destop pc that signal 7s every time I try to install Redhat or Suse, but then, I never bothered to see if all the hardware in those pcs was supported by either distro. The same machines run Win2k just fine. So what? It proves nothing. My anecdotal experience with our servers is that Win2k on supported, properly configured hardware will typically have very little if any unplanned downtime.

dominant in marketshare only... i find it endless frustrating and difficult to use. Macs are infinitely easier to use and as far as I'm concerned, so is KDE. I used to use Win9x/NT before I found linux.

I'm glad you have a choice to make. I do to, and I happen to find Win2k/XP the easiest to use.


Java - multi-platform
C# - windows only (you don't think MS is going to extend C# like they tried to extend Java for windows?)

Huh?

Now, you'd have to be insane to use windows as a production-level server.
Lots of insane people make their living off of windows as a production-level server
Unix is the only way to go... thus, Java.
What happened to choice? I thought GNU was about choices? What if I gasp> don't like to code in Java? Heck, what happened to OS/400 or BSD? You can have your choices. If you are more comfortable with Unix environments, then they will typically be cheaper for you to operate. But if you don't understand how to acquire quality hardware for Windows, and you dont know how to administer it, then you hardly have any room to cast stones.

If you're the type even considering how much stress a laptop can take, you should look into programs like Dell's CompleteCare Program. According to their website, it is "provides you repair or replacement of your Latitude or Inspiron notebook PC for any damage that is caused by accidents."

Not suprisingly, not covered in this program: Damage from fire, intentional damage (hammer marks), stolen unit, and normal wear.

I have two 19" flat CRT Trinitrons at home connected to a Matrox G450. I highly suggest this card (or the G550) because it comes with good software for possitioning popup windows correctly instead of splitting it in the middle of two displays. It's nice not wasting an addition PCI slot as well, and both monitors have equal hardware pushing video to them. It also makes the display appear as one monitor to Windows, where as having two video cards actually show up as multiple devices to Windows. This allows the Tasktray to span across both monitors, and my active desktop as well. With multiple video cards, you have a master desktop that is just like a single desktop, then all the rest are just additional space to move windows to. I guess it depends on your personal taste, but I like having the displays appear as one to Windows.

My only word of caution: Having an odd number of displays is highly recommended as you won't have the border of two displays in the center of your vision. It's very distracting.

Dell 19" Trinitron

Matrox G450 (because it has dual VGA instead of dual DVI like the G550)

Image of my 3200 x 1200 desktop (with GTPlanet active desktop (that I made))

~LoudMusic

Lets see here...

I can go to Grand Vitesse Systems' online store and buy a 2U, dual 1Ghz mac with a gig of ram and all the other apple goodness (gigE, superdrive et al) for around $3500.

For compairson, we next go to dell and price out a similar 2U server using wintel, namely the PowerEdge 2550. Put in dual 1.4Ghz Intel pent III (G4's will eat this for breakfast), 1GB of ram, Red Hat 7.2 pre-installed, and basic everything else what do we get? $4,871!!! Granted this comes with an 18GB SCSI 10K drive vs. the mac's 80GB and 40GB ATA hard drives, but I think you can get a SCSI controller and a 18GB HD for less than $1300.

Face it, since OS X macs have been better than anything that runs on Intel for any application.

--InfinityEdge

IIRC, the server that Oracle showed off Oracle 8i with was an HP double-wide pedestal server (possibly a PA-RISC server).

The actual Notebook can take around 26 watts or more, depending upon what you are doing with it, especially heavy when watching DVDs (constant DVD motion plus the CPU running at full blast for the software decoder).

15 watts may be enough for a toy Notebook, but it ain't enough for mine!!!!!

Hi nice to meet you. I'm a sysadmin at a community college. Not that high a budget, y'know? Still, we use at least 10k scsi drives in everything we can, 15k for the ones that matter.
We make Good Use of these drives and if they were any slower i would be getting way way too many phone calls.

If you look at Dell's offerings (we buy a lot of dells here) in the server range, it's tough to find something that doesn't come with 10k scsi drives. I think their 350 is the only one that comes with IDE drives.
Going over to Sun's lineup, you'll see that their low-end desktop machines like their SunBlade 100 now have IDE drives in them but everything else has at least 10k scsi or fc drives.

I know plenty of people who run servers off of pc, IDE based hardware, but most of these are either personal sites of fellow geeks. My home mass storage unit has one of those nifty Promise FastTrack100 IDE RAID cards, but that's b/c i can't afford SCSI and the storage is only used by me (well, my friends too when they download my movies/mp3s, but scp'ing via my home net connection will in no way hammer the storage unit). Most server rooms i've been to have the dells or similar equipment with SCSI in them, even the really shitty server rooms with really shitty boxes, those people still use scsi cards & drives.

Of course you're right about cost and use, but in most environments it is essential to plan for the future. Buying more or faster disk than we currently need might seem silly now but sometimes growth occurs inversely proportionate to budget - i'm already regretting not having taken larger bites when i could of b/c some of our servers are becoming seriously underpowered and i dont know if our current budget will let us purchase what we need (but i bet i coulda swung for more when i first bought the server in question).

Nope. S-Video capable monitor.

6. One of the big five computer retailers offers a Linux boot (or dual boot) for a retail desktop machine.
Nope, didn't happen.

Given that I'm writing this on a laptop with 512MB of RAM at the moment, I'd like to point out that the future is now in regards to having a gig of RAM in laptops... and, really, it's economically feasible, as well.

Hi,
Here's the DELL I was pointed to Latitude C400-- looks quite close -- but it comes with nothing for the $1800 base price. Sorry I can't grab a URL for a maxed out C400 -- just check the boxes yourself, and press update price. I think we are basically talking cross-purposes. No doubt you can get a maxed out chunky black box for $2500, but not a lightweight TiBook/VAIO style one. A lot of the extra cost is in the engineering to get it down that thin.

Follow the customization, give it 1 gig, a combo drive, a builtin wireless card etc. Delete XP, and put on cheapest M$ os, and take the 3 year warranty. Oh, and the disk should be set to 30Gig. It starts to add up. I don't know whether the -$200 for the 866 is
worth it, I would go with the 1.2ghz cpu anyway. That might outclass the G4 on my tasks (I dont have specialised code that would take advantage of the G4's //ization.

For Apple go here: Take the TOP END configuration Here, hope this works

Incidentally, you are working on old data. The high end TiBook is 667 mhz.

Winton

Sorry this is a late reply, out to LOTR for the second time.

Dell has one (brand new), it is a Latitude C400 .

Well, I can tell you what is bad for...Security. Especially with win2000/XP automatic detection of USB devices it could be used as a effective delivery device for worm/virus packages to machines without or with protected email and Internet access. With the 1gig size you could certainly steal a lot of data very easily. So what if you the most secure firewall and email protection. Are you screening your maintenance people, your temp workers? With a little social engineering this device could be very dangerous, easy to conceal, even through metal detectors with the phrase "Oh, my keys set it off". Sorry if I'm little excited about it, I'm just a Spy Novel fan and have a really good caffeine buzz too.

Dell has been selling 8-32Mb versions for more than a year, but they require a driver install

Should I buy a Dell Desktop PC(TM)?

No, not really. I use the S-Video port on my monitor.

While you're at it, why not purchase a Dell computer?

Visit their website today and see what the buzz is about !!!

Visit their website today and see what everyone is talking about !!!

Honnestly it would be a really good thing for Linux.

If it was that way, I think that Dell, Compaq, HP, and others would sell more Linux-powered PCs (cheaper price), so people would buy more, and probably learn to like Linux as a "really good OS which will help working, playing, learning" --- better than the usual "black screen with command prompt designed by geeks for geeks" :).

WTF are they waiting for ? :)

Visit their website today !!!

Visit their website today !!!