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The Ultimate Linux Box 2001
savaget points to this Linux Journal article which covers building a superior personal computer for general usage. See if you agree with the choices that Rick Moen, Daryll Strauss and Eric Raymond made in building their dream box.
I realize the SCSI disks, especially the close to "SCSI 3" mentioned in the article, would decrease disk latency, but is it really that much different than 7200 or even 10000 rpm ATA100/ATA133 drives? An unless you have onboard SCSI, you have to go through the already busy PCI bus. As far as I'm concerned, it's not worth the price difference.
Okay, Raymond isn't a millionaire any more, either. But he does have corporate backing, which is a hell of a lot more than I've got. When I feel like dropping 15 large on a personal computer, I think I'll go for an OS a bit more upscale than Linux. Solaris, maybe.
Anyway, "dream" is the key word in the title of the article. No real Linux users (mostly college students, AFAIK) can afford a PC like ESR has designed. And I'm not sure what they'll accomplish by "dreaming" about the "ultimate" Linux box when the whole point of Linux is to be able use whatever old, junk hardware you can scrounge.
Am I missing something?
I know RAID is overkill for most workstations, but so is a DDS drive and seperate home and system drives. If you want fault tolerance, (the stated reason for two drives) having one system drive and one home drive with no RAID means you spend your money only to become twice as vulnerable to downtime due to drive failures.
If you want to avoid downtime, especially if money is no object, get a RAID controller and have a single filesystem mirrored over two physical disks. Not only will it be more reliable, it will be faster too.
"Today's flatscreens also have a really coarse dot pitch with sharp square pixels. As far as I'm concerned, that puts them out of the running for the ULB. I do a lot of writing and, not infrequently, my own typesetting; I want to be able to preview two pages of Postscript at actual size and have the fonts look good."
I'm sorry, but has this guy ever seen a high-end flat panel? I personally own an SGI 1600SW, and not only do you not see the pixels, but you can also preview two Postscript pages side-by-side with its 1600x1024 widescreen aspect ratio. Of course, SGI stopped selling it (*sigh*). But there are other excellent flat panels out there, like the Samsung line that lets you run a TV signal in and do picture-in-picture. I've seen the Samsung ones up close, and they have wonderful image quality. Apple also makes some excellent flat panels (does anyone know whether there is an adapter to run them on PCs yet?)
All I'm saying, is while there are still plenty of reasons to run CRT's, in a "cost-is-no-object" type of article, you should at least consider the high-end flat panels.
P.S. I've seen the dual 1600SW setup, and it is STILL, to this day, the only monitor setup that ever made me speechless with its absolute beauty.
> the whole point of Linux is to be able use whatever old, junk hardware you can scrounge.
Maybe that's YOUR whole point in using Linux, but it sure as hell ain't mine! If that's the way you feel, you'd be better off getting some nice DOS 3.11 disks somewhere.
I'd rather build a nice, fast 3Ware Escalade RAID array with 4 or so fast, big, and cheap IDE drives... and still save the CPU cycles.
Sigh. More sickeningly pompous prose from ESR in a completely useless article. Building a $7000 personal computer is a pointless exercise which almost nobody who reads Linux Journal could afford to do. All of his "insightful research" and "surprising discoveries" is stuff you could easily find out on Usenet or the various hardware enthusiast sites -- the last time I built a machine (well equipped Tbird 1.4 for under $1000, tyvfm), I researched all the bits and pieces before buying them and avoided all of the headaches he's complaining about. And he can't even build the stupid thing himself:
You could build the ULB yourself from scratch. But unless you're either a very experienced hardware hacker or seriously interested enough in having a learning experience to accept possibly trashing some expensive parts, maybe you shouldn't. I wouldn't.
Way to encourage the hacker ethic! Yeah! Let's all run out and pay someone to do stuff for us, because everyone knows work is hard. With hardware prices as low as they are, it's a perfect time for people to "hack" their own hardware and build a powerful machine on a budget even a college student can afford. That would make an interesting article, but this one is simply, to use a phrase ESR seems to enjoy, an exercise in mental masturbation.