System of the Year, Linux Style

Bob the Blob writes "LinuxHardware has put together a wonderful article that gathers up all of the top hardware into the ultimate Linux system from 2001. In the article, there is a review of the hardware from 2001 that discusses what we've seen and why the parts were chosen. To make you drool, think Athlon XP with GeForce 3 Ti500 with the stability of Linux." Worth noting that this machine is of course now at least 10 days obsolete ;)

Comments

This just in

[Chundra]

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Re:This just in

[FortKnox]

LMAO!
My question: why would you need a machine like that for linux? I only own a nice processor/lotsa memory/good video card, cause I like to play all the newage games. My linux box is a P100 MHz. I always thought the joy of linux was that you don't need the heavy hardware...

Only for specific purposes would you need a machine with all that (like graphic coder or something...).

BTW - Nice sig, but I'm no troll :-P

Re:This just in

[ViceClown]

Now that was funny. Kudos ;-)

Re:This just in

[greenfly]

I agree that one can get along nicely with an oldish desktop system. I still use my Libretto 50CT for a laptop, and it works nicely. But I wouldn't think of seriously running KDE or Gnome fulltime on it's 100Mhz processor and 32Megs of RAM. E runs on it, but not as quickly as I'd like, so I use Windowmaker. But when you start doing things like playing MP3s, you can forget about doing much else if you don't like skipping.

While these aren't things that many people are doing yet, there are some reasons why getting a top-of-the-line system like that would be nice, such as up and coming games and video encoding.

But for basic stuff, you are right, you can get by on very humble system specs.

Re:This just in

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use Nautilus/gmc because I like having a pristine desktop, but I have a PII/266 with 256MB RAM, and things run fine with GNOME and sawfish. And if stuff is skipping, use priority levels! That's what they're there for!

Re:This just in

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus has something to say about this kind of articles.. I think it was "online masturbation"

Obsolete?

[ackthpt]

I thought one of Linux' charms was that it delayed obsolesence. I.e. find the lost power of that old 486/66.

Still pretty impressed with what it does on my 70MHz SparcIPX (it's got a sped up processor ;)

Re:Obsolete?

[Sivar]

I thought one of Linux' charms was that it delayed obsolesence. I.e. find the lost power of that old 486/66. Some people prefer not waiting 6 hours for the kernel to compile. :-) FreeBSD's "make buildworld" command recompiles everything on the entire system. I wonder how adequate a 486 is then. Yes, Linux and BSD are perfectly useable on ancient hardware...in console mode. Try KDE or Gnome,however, and feel the pain.

Re:Obsolete?

[ackthpt]

Try KDE or Gnome,however, and feel the pain.

I'm one of those old curmudgeons who still uses feeble [fvwm] :-)

SWEET!

[clinko]

Now i can take this baddass linux box and reboot to windows to play games even faster!

Re:SWEET!

[DRO0]

I'm sure some would consider your post as troll-ish, but it does lead to a valid point.

What's really so great about having a GF3 on Linux? The most graphically intensive games are probably Quake3 and UT and a Voodoo3 on up work more than adequately for them. For fun gaming at the price of a GF3 I'd get a Nintendo Gamecube with Super Smash Brothers Melee and Madden 2002.

I'm running an Athlon 1.2Ghz and a GF2 MX and don't feel that I'm suffering at all. Plus with RAM so dirt cheap (I have 768 or something like that), the longevity of hardware is even greater IMHO.

Re:SWEET!

[Sivar]

Voodoo 3? Yes, it's adequate if you don't mind running in 800x600 with (rather nastly looking) 16-bit color. Remember, when the Voodoo 3 was released, there were people saying "Why would you need a Voodoo 3? The most graphically intensive games are probably Quake2 and Unreal and a Voodoo1 up up works more than adequately for them." Note that gaming hardware advanced about two to three times faster than processors. Why buy a card like that when the games of tomorrow (and today) need more already?

Re:SWEET!

[spencerogden]

Maybe a Voodoo 3 is exagerated, but his point was that availible 3d games for linux are old, so a TNT say would be enough. It's not like you can run Medal of Honor on linux, so why buy the horse power to do it?

Re:SWEET!

[Anonymous Coward]

GF2 ultra cost me $300+ earlier in 2001. One year later, people laugh at it. Though it'll last me quite a bit longer, I learned my lesson on latest greatest graphics card

Re:SWEET!

[barole]

If you are doing OpenGL development, it is a good platform. Linux + GF3 (or GF2 for that matter) beats low-end SGI and costs a tenth as much.

Re:SWEET!

[RandomCoil]

The answer to your question is that there are uses for 3D accelerators beyond games. My research lab has replaced aging SGI workstations (used for molecular visualization -- google "VMD") with ridiculously cheap linux boxes with GeForce cards. While I wouldn't buy a GF3 Ti500 today (do you want your tax-dollars paying for nVidia's R&D?), I will be more than happy to buy systems with them when they reach a $100-$150 price.

RC

Re:SWEET!

[gid]

I had an gf2 mx, I thought was a bit on the slow side for 32bit color (because of the more narrow memory bandwidth). Bought a gf2 gts which is much better, but I definitely wouldn't mind a gf3.

If you don't mind 640x480 16 bit color, all detail and lighting set to the fastest, and only a half ass framerate, then sure a voodoo3's plenty. Personally, I like full eye candy, at least 800x600, 32 bit color, full detail, and ideally a framerate that doesn't drop below 100. It's all a matter of preference.

RTCW mutliplayer can be absolutely brutal on the hardware (my gf2 mx card choked hard core), but it looks great!

Re:SWEET!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure,

but don't forget to add the $200 price of Windows - me I'd rather use it on a good controller of some sort (or maybe just beer :))

Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[I.T.R.A.R.K.]

"To make you drool, think Athlon XP with GeForce 3 Ti500 with the stability of Linux."

Now what exactly are you going to run on Linux that will take advantage of the Geforce 3?
Blazing fast command line with realtime pixel shading? C'mon people. Get real.

If you even suggest rendering software, I'll tell you this: I run everything from Maya 4, to 3DS Max R4 and even Bryce, and the rendering times on my Geforce 3 aren't much different from those of my old TNT 2 Ultra.
Fix the other bottlenecks in the system before you start playing with the video cards.

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[negativekarmanow tm]

If you even suggest rendering software, I'll tell you this: I run everything from Maya 4, to 3DS Max R4 and even Bryce, and the rendering times on my Geforce 3 aren't much different from those of my old TNT 2 Ultra.

That's not a very big surprise, since the real-time rendering a 3d chip performs has *NOTHING* to do with the rendering of these applications : they all use their own engines, which create far better realism, but not in real-time.

A fast 3d chip will only make modelling easier, because you can get a decent (real-time) preview of what your doing.

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[core10k]

No, what he's trying to say is that Linux has bottlenecks, that Windows does not have, that prevent the full use of hardware acceleration cards.

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[bigjocker]

There are two main areas in 3D production, modelling and rendering. These kind of cards are for the first part, modelling and creating the animation files.

When you have millions of polygons and want to spin the camera, you need a card of this quality. It has nothing to do with rendering, which is a processor intensive task.

Sure, you can model a landscape in bryce with any card, but when you have the LOTR balrog sitting in Houdini or Maya, you need something really powerful, even the Geforce 3 will not be enough.

For the rendering phase you have the clusters and render farms, and there you need an 1's and 0's cruncher, and a CGA card will do the job as good as the Geforce 10.000 ...

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[Anonymous Coward]

let's seee...

quake 3
Unreal, everything sold by Loki entertainment
Terminus.

any Open GL app.

Why... dont windows use Open GL? (i know it does, but I have to take the low blow at the troll.)

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[I.T.R.A.R.K.]

None of those games take advantage of any of the new hardware features of the Geforce 3.
So, what do you need the card for besides showing off 120+ fps?

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[gid]

Now what exactly are you going to run on Linux that will take advantage of the Geforce 3?

Quake3 or RTCW with full eye candy on. Sure there's only two, but really, what else is there? :) I keep plenty entertained with all the Quake3 mods, mostly with soley Q3F. And yes, having that card would be advantageous, since with my GF2 GTS, I can only run at 800x600 with all the quality settings and the framerate I desire when playing Q3F, especially during heavy fire fights. Having antialiasing on probably would be nice too, but crank yer res up to 1600x1280, and then there's no need. :)

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[I.T.R.A.R.K.]

"...since with my GF2 GTS, I can only run at 800x600 with all the quality settings"

Serious?? Damn. My old TNT2 Ultra 32 meg card could handle Quake 3 very smoothly at 1152x864 with full effects.

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. There seems to be a complete focus on gaming, as if tyhe best card for gaming is the best card. I am doing high end CAD and graphic art. Gamers cards have historicaly been second best for these type of apps.

Re:Geforce 3 on Linux? Whatever for?

[I.T.R.A.R.K.]

That all depends where you're coming from. Sure, the software engine allows for certain kinds of effects (raytracing, antialiasing, lightmap, etc), but there are two ways these effects can be rendered: Either on the hardware, or by software.
I've found that hardware-based rendering is a lot faster than software, but still, the Geforce 3 itself is far too powerful for any of these programs, and none of them were written to take advantage of the Geforce 3's new memory architecture or shading capabilities. I honestly don't think that card is getting it's due justice because of this. But give it time. I'll be impressed when Kinetix releases a driver specifically for the Geforce 3. Then we'll see the shit hit the fan.

Or have they already?
I'm going to check right now, actually..

Seti

[svara]

Let's all convince our governments that owning such a machine is vital for scientific progress (finding aliens, cracking rc5 keys, etc) and get them to sponsor such a box to each and every citizen!

Re:Seti

[gewalker]

Forget claiming a machine is vital for scientific progress.

Today you say: I need XXX million dollars to fight terrorism. If you need scientific progress, this is just another aspect of anti-terrorism.

Aliens -- potential terrorists, especially if they wear a turban.

cracking rc5 keys -- thwarting the privacy of intercepted terrorist messages.

Linux -- Communist software is ok as long as not terrorist. If you worried about this being a red flag on you grant money, go ahead and get the bungled M$ O/S then overwrite it.

News for Nerds -- Moore's law continues for another day.

Re:Seti

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? What the hell are you babbling about?

GeForce? Feh.

[Snowfox]

It seems like a 'Linux System of the Year' ought to fully embody the Linux spirit, which nvidia does not. I'd much rather see a Radeon in there.

nvidia cards are severely limited if you're not willing to run the closed-source drivers. nvidia still won't share all of the information about their cards needed for activating DVI-D and other parts of the display output hardware, as well as pieces of the rendering hardware.

Admittedly, nvidia has done a decent job of keeping the closed-source drivers up to date for 98% of the users out there, but simple things like using an nvidia card as your secondary/tertiary display can still lock your system up, and there's not much you can realistically do to fix that without the source.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, the Radeon support is shit, and the newer cards aren't supported at all yet. SGI-sponsored OpenGL from nVidia is the best out there, and at 99% of the performance of the Windows version. End of story.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it obvious why Nvidia will not open source their drivers? (I'm not an ATI/Nvidia fan-- A conspiracy loony, maybe) Because releasing that information will show that when drivers are first released they are intentionally designed to be underperforming! This is how they can release drivers that increase the performance of their cards. Now, logically, you could say that this makes no sense, that Nvidia should simply release the most optimized code right away. However, underperforming drivers mean that they can tweak their drivers in the event that ATI releases a new card and Nvidia does not have any new silicon ready. Likely they learned this lesson from Intel when Intel was caught with its pants down when AMD released the Athlon.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[ImaLamer]

While I see your point about open source very well, I can't fully agree.

At least there are drivers available. They could have simply ignored linux like plenty of other hardware vendors and left you to deal with it on your own.

In a fantasy world we would have the source to everything, but that isn't the case. If for say, a company was going to reveal trade secrets, we shouldn't shun them because they are protecting them.

Sometimes we aren't going to get the source. It's that simple. Be happy we have drivers at all really. They did what they could to make you happy.

I believe this is the reluctance to release games and the like for the linux OS, people bitch if it's not 100% Open Source[ed].

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[dsb3]

I just bought a Radeon 7500. After compiling Xfree86 from CVS (to get it to work in the first place - the [78]500 cards are supported in CVS only at the moment) it gives me a framerate in glxgears that's about 1/10th of a nVidia TNT2 (that probably costs about 1/5 as much).

With a 50:1 performance/cost ratio going on between them, that may have been the last ATI I buy.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[geekoid]

Couple of points:
OS advocates say is fast release times, lower bugs, and quicker bug fixes then most CS projects, but, If a company wrote good software, fixed bugs quickly, and had a fast release time, why would we need OS?
If MS came out with a truly secure, well written, stable OS, wouldn't that kill most off the advantages of OS?

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[rveety]

The radeon [78]500 cards are not supported by the DRI or XFree cvs. Only 2d is supported at this time, so you are running glxgears in software mode.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is very obvious. nVidia has signed NDAs with SGI to bring true OpenGL to Linux, and the performance shows that quite clearly by ripping a new one for every other video card out there. How many times have people had to say this?? Further, when a new card is released, it still _destroys_ the current competition, so your "theory" is bull. Please try again, okay?

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Afrosheen]

Yeah and when that happens, I'll send you a picture of my Snowman in hell.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[core10k]

Anyone intelligent enough to write device drivers would also, presumably, be intelligent enough to A)know how to hide their card-slowing instructions or B)know how to talk to the hardware engineers down the hall who know how to hide their card-slowing instructions.

Face it, they just don't give a flying fuck about Linux. Don't blame them, either, Linux hasn't proven it's worth the time of day yet. Probably never will.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

But don't worry, the drivers are Open Source, so that makes them better than the nVidia versions! It doesn't matter that you can only do shoddy 2d with no 3d, and that's ONLY from CVS source! Sorry, I'll take functionality and speed over source any day.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Osty]

Or, you could lose the conspiracy theory and enter the real world. nVidia will not release the source to their drivers for one simple reason -- they have a lot of intellectual property tied up into those drivers, property they developed by spending millions in R&D funds. Opening the drivers is simply an invitation for their competitors to steal all their hard work. Maybe that's fine if you subscribe to RMS's unreachable utopia where no proprietary software exists (and nobody goes hungry, and nobody shits, and we all sit around singing filk songs at morale meetings ...), but here in the real world that's the perfect way to bankruptcy.

So, you say, why don't they just give us the specs to the boards, if they won't open the drivers? The answer here is two-fold. First, it can easily be dismissed by the IP argument above. But that's a cop-out. The real reason is because nVidia uses a unified architecture that allows them to write drivers that will work on any of their cards, from the oldest Riva TNT (not the Riva128 or earlier) to the latest GeForce 3 ti500. Releasing register-level information would undermine that process, and generate many different, incompatible drivers. I for one like to know that regardless of what nVidia-based graphics card I have, I can always go to www.nvidia.com and get drivers that will work. So why don't they release the specs to the layer above the register-level hardware? Intellectual property :) (hey, you knew it was coming.)

As for underperforming drivers, that's a by-product of nVidia's aggressive production cycles (where they generally try to have a new product or a refresh of the last product out every six months). They learned their lesson way back in the day, after nearly going under because they took so long on the nv1 (oddly enough, Sega bailed them out by contracting nVidia to do the graphics in the Saturn, and now Sega is the one in financial trouble and nVidia has moved to a different console manufacturer ...). If you only have six months to get your new hardware or hardware refresh out the door, you don't have much time to work on drivers. However, driver development is always happening (just look at the frequency of "leaked" alpha and beta drivers). And on top of all that, and as a by-product of the above unified design, all owners of nVidia products (well, again, anything RivaTNT1 or newer, anyway) benefit from these driver advances. Two years after buying a TNT2 Ultra board, I was still able to get a performance increase simply by downloading the latest drivers (well, I run a GF3 now, but because of nVidia's aggressive driver development, my TNT2 latested much longer than a comparable 3dfx board for example).

Point: You need to learn how nVidia runs their business (and it's a good lesson to learn, as nVidia went from near-bankruptcy to insanely successful in only a few short years) before you go promoting conspiracy theories with no basis in reality.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Sivar]

Couple of points: OS advocates say is fast release times, lower bugs, and quicker bug fixes then most CS projects, but, If a company wrote good software, fixed bugs quickly, and had a fast release time, why would we need OS? If MS came out with a truly secure, well written, stable OS, wouldn't that kill most off the advantages of OS?

You have some good points, but you probably shouldn't use "OS" (Open Source) and OS (Operating System) in the same sentence. It's confusing. :-)

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[__aanonl8035]

Except it misses the most important point of all. With an Open Source License, the code is more accessible to the end users. If the company goes under, you are not left high and dry. For some, it goes beyond that. To not be cobbled by a companies whims with regards to the source code. Example

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[rgmoore]

I think that you miss the point. The point is not to blast NVidia for releasing only binary drivers but rather to reward ATI for making open source drivers possible. The Radeon is at least competitive with the GeForce, and given a choice between two competitive products, the Ultimate Linux Box should pick the one that is most in keeping with the spirit of Linux, i.e. Free/Open Source Software.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[baronben]

If any one can produce a secure, stable, OS, or for that matter any product that is head and sholders above the rest, it will do very well, possibly to the point of destroying the rest of the compotition because it is so perfect it makes you want to cry with joy. However, the compotition will not go away if this maigc OS is 10K a pop, or if it can only be run on a 10ghtz machine with a gig of ram and a terrbyte of harddrive space, and some sort of reverse enginered UFO technology. No matter how good a product is, there is usaly some reason for compotion to exist, if only to fill the nitch markets of people with out the 10k and super computer needed.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Greyfox]

They'd have to start designing and coding from scratch. There's a lot of baggage they'd need to jettison. And they can't start from scratch because that would mean losing their foothold.

Linux has a lot going for it outside its stability and security. Look at what you get. You get an entire system with all the tools you could possibly want. For free. And Microsoft can't match that because they make their money selling those tools. Hell for what their OS costs, I could install Linux AND buy a bunch of Loki games.

If they did come out with an OS that blew all that away, I wouldn't have any qualms about switching over, mind you. I choose my OS because it's the best way to run my computer and that's pretty much it.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe a Radeon 8500 outbenches a GeForce3 anyhow, does it not?

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who plays online video games like Quake 3 and UnrealTournament, I hope NVidia never open sources their drivers.

There are two sets of people who would have interest in the drivers. The first want to improve them and other would want to make hacks to cheats. If there was a large out cry from the gaming community on how Linux users are using hacks to cheat, you might see game companies choose the easiest fix for that problem. That would be to not develop games for Linux.

You have to choose the right license for the code. GPL sometimes is not that best choice.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Afrosheen]

I hope someone mods you up. Good points indeed. My tnt2 ultra was still kicking (and still is on my brother's computer) and still has mad features. The unified driver architecture is brilliant. If you install the nvidia drivers under linux, you can switch from a TNT to a Geforce3 and anywhere in between while having to make NO CHANGES to your xconfig or anything else.

Also recently someone benchmarked the geforce3 ti under linux. The 2314 drivers under linux give better performance than winxp in quake3 at most resolutions. RTCW didn't fare quite as well but the MP release is still beta. I bet TTimo hasn't slept for weeks.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, sometimes you will not get the source. If your response is to give them an award, then you will get the source less and less in the future.

But let's face it -- these guy's idea of the "Linux System Of The Year" is really "Windows Gaming System of The Year that you can be l33t by installing Mandrake on".

The real Linux System of The Year is something like an 8-way Xeon or Alpha.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[dan g]

The problem isn't just with the ethics of people who want to use open source software. If you have a closed source module loaded into your kernel and it oopses on you, you only have one recourse: take the oops to Nvidia--even if the crash was in your scsi driver or the network layer. Kernel developers won't touch bug reports from people who have proprietary drivers loaded because there is no way to know what that driver is doing to other parts of the kernel (without disassembling it).

dan.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see, the 2d is a lot sharper at many resolutions with the GeForce 3, and 3d is non-existent with the latest Radeon series, even under XFree86 CVS. I'd say it doesn't even come close.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are likely no card-slowing instructions, but there may be ways to speed up the card, which the current drivers do not use. My Matrox G400 card boots with a slow clock speed at first (~166 Mhz). The Windows drivers set this to a higher speed (252 Mhz). I use 'Option "OverclockMem"' in my XF86Config ('man mga') to increase the speed to the Windows values.

There are also ways to increase the driver performance, such as writing speed-critical parts in assembly (paying attention to details like instruction pairing, pipelines, caches, and branch prediction). Nvidia releases new cards frequently, and probably don't have time to sqeeze every last bit of performance out of the drivers before they release the card. It's not necessarily a conspiracy.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Snowfox]

I don't see why you'd even want a decent graphics card for a Linux box. It would just be a waste of money. Unless you like to go around telling people that your server/development machine has a bitchin' video card.

Judging by the number of presenters using Linux at Siggraph, the number of people playing games under Linux, and the number of people like myself who make video games for a living and prototype things under Linux, I'd say that your view of Linux is a bit more narrow than the reality of the situation.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[barole]

The thing that amazes me about nvidia is that they do appear to take linux users seriously. There have been several releases of the drivers and support for GF3 was fairly quick after the board came out. The number of OpenGL and GLX extensions they support is overwhelming! While new features appear to make into win32 drivers first, they continue to add new extensions to the linux driver on a fairly rapid basis.

There is no other solution on linux that gives you the power under OpenGL that nvidia does.

I think, if anything, we should be rewarding them, rather than complaining. Without nvidia, linux does not make a reasonable OpenGL platform. (Mesa is nice, but too slow to be practical for many applications).

I have no connections with them; I'm just a happy OpenGL developer.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but the nVidia kernel drivers aren't closed source. Only the GLX libraries are. I've looked through the kernel code several times.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[dan g]

Ah, but the nVidia kernel drivers aren't closed source. Only the GLX libraries are. I've looked through the kernel code several times.

Ahh my ass...the drivers are most certainly closed source. There is some open sourced glue that wraps the binary-distributed module.

However you feel like wording it, there winds up being code linked with the kernel that is a total mystery to everyone but Nvidia, and that is what leads to the problem of my original post.


dan.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need a 'big & bad' video card.

Linux has shit for games. What, 3 good titles?

linux is for bitches.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[philovivero]

While I see your point about open source very well, I can't fully agree

Then you'd best re-read the point again. I have an nvidia card, and EVERY TIME I watch a DVD (using VLC) without fail, my system locks up hard, and I need to REBOOT in order to reset my video hardware.

EVERY TIME I play Q3A for more than about 45 minutes, my system will lock up and I need to REBOOT in order to reset my video hardware.

At least once a week my whole X subsystem gets a sig11 and crashes, killing my well-crafted 20-desktop layout of xterms, email, browsers, gimp, gqview, xmms, etc etc, and when I reboot stupid GNOME puts every single app on desktop one. Therefore I have to place everything manually again.

Sure, I can watch DVDs and play Q3A on my Linux system, and I get the EXACT SAME STABILITY OR WORSE than Windows 2000 now.

I've been Windows-free for four years, and now I'm right back to the reasons I left Windows in the first place.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's crap. I don't mind paying money for a closed source game, because closed source games are an END PRODUCT.

I don't need starcraft to run my graphics card, but I do need a graphics card to run starcraft. It's the compatibility chain that's important, and once one party's product is dependent on a closed source product from another party, they are at the ransom of that party to continue. That's why closed source anything is a problem, but it's at its most problematic at the driver level.

We must remember that NVidia had ALWAYS promised to release open source drivers for all their products until about a week before they signed an agreement to supply the hardware to the X-Box... Funny that..

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[subsolar2]

I recently faced the choice between going with a GeForce3 Ti 200 and a Radeon 7500.

I picked the 7500 because:
1. I've never have gotten nVidia's drivers to work on my system.
2. I believe it's good to support hardware vendors that support open source.

I believe that voting with my wallet is the only way to effect change with hardware manufacturers. So my last two purchases have been an Epson USB scanner and now the Radeon since both companies support open source developers.

nVidia needs to open up the drivers so that it can be properly be supported under linux. The only way to reach the "fantasy world" is by making the choice to support the companies that work with the community.

- subsolar

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[dunkelfalke]

lot sharper image? bullshit. go here:
GeForce/TNT Image Quality Problems Due to RFI Filtering

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[gid]

Interesting, I have a gf2 gts and everything solid for me. I'm running Debian unstable, so I have the latest and greatest of all the software.

What you described sound like a hardware problem. What cpu you have? Do you have a rear case fan? How hot does your cpu get? Try updating your bios to the latest rev and turn off any "turbo mode" your bios may have, maybe disabling agp 4x mode with the nvidia drivers (make sure you have the latest version of these). Or if your linux install is old, you may try upgrading to newer software, and the latest 2.4.17 kernel. Maybe try different ram, if you have two sticks, try taking one out then the other. Or maybe try running http://freshmeat.net/projects/memtest86/ and see if that finds any memory problems.
Try moving your sound card into a different pci slots, I've had that solve weird random crashes before.

I used to have a similar problem with quake3 locking up, but I upgraded my bios, and that made it go away. It can be really frustrating, I know, seeing as how I sank a grand or so in parts awhile ago to build a new linux machine only to have it crash all the time. Fortunately I was able to fix it.

I'm running window maker and mozilla as my browser. Mozilla crashes every now and then, .9.7 sucked ass, jan 7th build is rock solid so far, but anyway, X remains up. I haven't had an X crash that I can remember in probably well over a year. I used to run gnome myself, but I couldn't stand the random crashes, so I switched back to my old stand by of wmaker which was more solid.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[ImaLamer]

We must remember that NVidia had ALWAYS promised to release open source drivers for all their products until about a week before they signed an agreement to supply the hardware to the X-Box... Funny that..


Exactly my point. It seems that most, if not all nvidia cards use the same sort of programming.

If they released the source they maybe opening the xbox to hacking. I support said hacking, but in the business world they don't.

So instead of replying to the rest of the comments posted under me, let me do it here:

Yes, it would be ideal if they opened the drivers. If you want to support companies that do open the drivers, by all means... do so. But please also see that drivers are in fact released and they work a lot of the time.

If you are having problems with the card and drivers, please direct your bug reports and oops's to nvidia. Since they have released some working drivers, maybe they need some help.

Sorry we can't always have it our way, but sometimes we get close.

If you have a problem with the GeForce, and it not carrying on the linux creed, complain to ThinkGeek as well. Ever seen those ads?

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Matrox has had better Linux support than ATI or Nvidia for a long, long time. To be fair, their offerings don't compare when you're playing games, but if you aren't building a gaming box, you're quite likely to be very happy with a Matrox card. And there are top-notch *open source* Matrox drivers. And Matrox drivers are pretty stable, unlike (cough) Nvidia's.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Error27]

>>Sorry we can't always have it our way, but sometimes we get close.

One way to have your own way is to buy a radeon. It has an open source driver. I would buy that before I baught a geforce.

But then again, I really like to get my own way.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Hoser McMoose]

The Radeon might be competitive with the GeForce3 under Windows, but their Linux drivers are VERY immature at the moment and it get's completely blown out the water.

The simple fact of the matter is that if you want good 3D performance under Linux TODAY, you NEED nVidia. No other company can even beat the low-end nVidia cards, let alone their high-end stuff.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Snowfox]

Matrox has had better Linux support than ATI or Nvidia for a long, long time. To be fair, their offerings don't compare when you're playing games, but if you aren't building a gaming box, you're quite likely to be very happy with a Matrox card. And there are top-notch *open source* Matrox drivers. And Matrox drivers are pretty stable, unlike (cough) Nvidia's.

I'll second, but clarify as well. Matrox is much closer to open source than most any other accelerated driver provided by a card/chipset manufacturer.

It does include a closed-source portion however, but I believe it's limited to the microcode that gets downloaded to the card. It would be nice to have that as well, but so far it hasn't stood in the way of fixing bugs and porting the driver to non-PC architectures.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[HiThere]

You've described quite well their reasons for not releasing the source. (Well, some of them.) But those don't directly affect me. What affects me are things like:
1) Will it work?
2) Will it continue to work when I upgrade?
3) Will it work when I do a clean install from a distribution's CDs?
4) Can I adapt it to suit my needs?

So I'm not directly interested in their justifications for why they are doing things the way that they are. I'm interested in whether I can use the tool that they are selling to do what I want to do in the way that I want. For this open source has definite advantages. (And this even though I'll never write a video driver in my life.)

If there are any advantages to me in a closed source distribution, I don't see it, and several decades of unpleasant experiences show that there are many disadvantages.

Open source also has its disadvantages. Linux has gotten a lot better in the last couple of years, but I had a struggle getting started. And the word processors are still clunky, though they're getting better fast. etc. The flash and splash is slow to appear, and things tend to never achieve a finished look. (KDE and Gnome are clear exceptions here, but consider even their basic applications for examples.) But you don't get hung out to dry. I've never had an open source application leave me, though I've left several of them. Indeed one of the main problems with Open Source is the "embarassment of riches" problem. How does one choose! In the major categories this is settling down to a few major choices, with the others reserved for those with special needs. But compare this with the Windows word processor market. They one uses MS Word. (Unless one is a lawyer .. then one may use Word Perfect.) And if that's an inappropriate tool, use it anyway. There aren't any significant options. Think how much that simplifies choosing. Of course, the version keeps changing, new versions appear to be heading toward application rental rather than purchase (lease, officially). So you can expect to be hung out to dry regularly. But you don't need to worry about too many choices. And it's quite polished. (Debugging is a totally separate concept.)

So...
To my mind, a better choice for "the ideal Linux system" would have had open source drivers.
.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are having problems with the card and drivers, please direct your bug reports and oops's to nvidia. Since they have released some working drivers, maybe they need some help.

nvidia have made it very clear that they have no interest in supporting unpopular configurations (such as 2 nv cards in one machine) and ports to nonstandard hardware. I can't even get a reply from them for my efforts to support GeForce 2 MX PCI DVI on an Amiga/68030.

Re:GeForce? Feh.

[plastik55]

Uhm, ATI has refuced to release the specs for several key features of their vodeo chipsets (notably the MPEG-decoding-related features of hardware IDCT and motion compentation.)

Consequently I have to reboot my laptop to a closed OS whenever I want to watch a DVD at more than 10 fps.

/. effect

[negativekarmanow tm]

12 comments and already slashdotted.
I guess their hardware is not quite up to par.

Re:/. effect

[BrianRowe]

I tried their site when there was 1 comment and it was slashdot'ed. I still can't get in!

Nice System

[Webratta]

That's a very nice system, and I can't help but drool. With the Raw Coolness factor of Linux, this machine must SCREAM. Of course, install Windows XP on it and watch it just barely outperform a cranky 286 with the turbo button un-depressed.

Re:Nice System

[Anonymous Coward]

try independent thought sometime, cowboy. then again, some people are better off living in the land of hype.

Re:Nice System

[Captain Salad]

Have you ever actually used Win XP before?

I have XP installed on a three-year-old machine and it runs faster than Redhat 7.2 on the other partition.

Re:Nice System

[kin_korn_karn]

that's right, credit where credit is due. XP rules for home use.

Re:Nice System

[Webratta]

Using it right now, on a decent system, too (1.4 gigahertz pentium 4, with only 128Mb of RDRAM). It is still lots more sluggish than the linux installs I have done on my Pentium 133 sitting in the corner. Of course, I'm not using a lot of bloatware on my Linux box (Nautilus is waaaay too slow for my taste on ANY system) so I guess it is an unfair comparison.

Personally.

[Renraku]

Personally, I wouldn't have the need for a system like this under Linux unless I planned on running a server and maybe do some 3d modeling. The main uses for such powerful hardware are servers and games. Only one of those Linux does well.

Oh, yeah.

[Mike1024]

Hey,

To make you drool, think Athlon XP with GeForce 3 Ti500 with the stability of Linux.

That will be useful! The $300 graphics card will be ideal for all the 3D-intensive games that are only availiable for Windows!

Michael

Re:Oh, yeah.

[TedCheshireAcad]

That will be useful! The $300 graphics card [pricewatch.com] will be ideal for all the 3D-intensive games that are only availiable for Windows!

Unfortunately, this is true.

But, just think of your TuxRacer framerate.

Re:Oh, yeah.

[dsb3]

Such as Quake3, Unreal Tournament and Return to Castle Wolfenstein that *all* run under Linux.

nVidia's also have a decent frame rate under linux even though they have somewhat funky kernel drivers.

Re:Oh, yeah.

[MisterBlister]

Quake3 and UT are nearly 3 years old. RtCW is newer, but largely based on the same engine as Quake3.

None of these games take advantage of the features of a GeForce 3. You'd see very little difference between a GeForce 2 MX and a high-end GeForce 3 running these games.

The point the original poster made, though it came off sounding a little trollish, is 100% correct.

Re:Oh, yeah.

[Captain Salad]

REALLY?!?

ALL of those games??!?!

WOW! I'd better install Linux on my game machine right away!!

Re:Oh, yeah.

[BrookHarty]

Doesnt RTCW (Wolfenstien), Q3A and Tribe2 also have linux ports?

Re:Oh, yeah.

[Jacek Poplawski]

But, just think of your TuxRacer framerate.

Oh yes, I believe you. You want to buy Athlon XP and Geforce for playing TuxRacer. And you never run Windows there.

Think how fast kernel compiles on Geforce! And how fast you can use vim with Athlon XP!

Re:Oh, yeah.

[Archie Steel]

Quake3 and UT are nearly 3 years old. RtCW is newer, but largely based on the same engine as Quake3.

None of these games take advantage of the features of a GeForce 3. You'd see very little difference between a GeForce 2 MX and a high-end GeForce 3 running these games.

No matter who old those games are, they are still widely played. And as far as RTCW is concerned, having a more powerful card does make a difference.

But I'm curious, which games would make owning a GF3 worthwhile, in your opinion? To me, RTCW is pretty much cutting edge...

Anyway, you'll be able to use that neat GF3 card to play Doom 3 when it comes out. Being an id game, it should run on Linux!

Re:Oh, yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

But Q3A and Tribe2 are ported by Loki which does a horriable job of providing support. There is even several cases where they figured out a work-around but still haven't updated their documentation to reflect it. Then there is the bugs they close out as "invalid" with the solution "it SHOULD work." That is not to say that Loki is all bad. They have done a great job with their contributions to SDL and OpenAL but in terms of supporting the game ports, they tend to get a little over 90% working and then stop short. It will be interesting to see how TransGaming compettes.

Re:Oh, yeah.

[jrockway]

> Quake3 and UT are nearly 3 years old.

And they're _still_ really fun. Just because it's not new (heh.... or GNU) doesn't mean you can't use it. That having been said, I use Linux/PPC and my graphics card doesn't support DRI. Oh well. Mario is fun too (and it's 17 or so years old).

Re:Oh, yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia will announce the "GeForce 4" in a couple weeks according to the rumor mills. If you are buying a card to Future Proof yourself for Doom 3 and UT2, the GF3 is a bad bet -- you'll just be wanting a new card when the next gen games come out.

Re:Oh, yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

(IANALFB and IANAFLE apply) Examples, please. Maybe for those bugs, 'Invalid' was correct. Unless you posted about the Q3A keyboard bug: I'll give you credit for that one (it was Zoid's fault though).

How 'bout a "decent" system

[tif]

I've seen the "ultimate linux box" articles before. What I wish they'd write is the "affordable and reliable linux box". In other words, just tell what's a good sound card for linux, a good video card, etc.

--tif

Re:How 'bout a "decent" system

[DeltaStorm]

I've seen the "ultimate linux box" articles before. What I wish they'd write is the "affordable and reliable linux box". In other words, just tell what's a good sound card for linux, a good video card, etc.Just hold on to those articles for a year or two, then you'll have a "decent" system.

Re:How 'bout a "decent" system

[Anonymous Coward]

Duke of URL did it. Buyer's Guide 13

Re:How 'bout a "decent" system

[TedCheshireAcad]

LinuxHardware.org does hardware reviews, but of course, they plug their own stuff.

Internet.com has a decent hardware review site, but this is mainly geared towards server hardware.

ZDNet also has a pretty decent Linux section, with hardware reviews and compatability lists.

And, if you want to get straight to business, Google has a wealth of information regarding tech review sites.

Hope this helps,

Ted

Re:How 'bout a "decent" system

[dunkelfalke]

ecs k7s5a with onboard sound&lan
duron 1000
ati radeon ddr or geforce 2 mx (would take the radeon because of much better image quality - crappy rf filter on most nvidia cards)
hdd, dvdrom, monitor and keyboard of your choise
logitech oem mouse
if you want a quality soundcard pick a creative live! player (or player 5.1) for they are quite cheap because of the audigy ones and have outstanding sound quality
and DON'T buy cheap psu and memory - the stability difference is enormous

Re:How 'bout a "decent" system

[hmarq]

You know, I live for that, and it's amazing what you can build for cheap that works great!

FIC AZ11 MOBO ~$30 on auction sites
ECS K7S5A ~$50 w/AC97 snd and SiS NIC on board
Duron @ $50 (should get you about a 750Mhz today)
Decent Case (I like Enlight 71XX) ~$60
PC133 still works fine for me 256MB @ $30

A 'base' *decent* system for ~$200US

Splurge for a new ATI Radeon (OEM package) $75 -- or find a used or discounted G400

So you need a floppy and a CD now --- you've got one of those laying around, right? ... if not that's what computer shows, old used machines and friends are for.

Nope, it's not a rocketship.
Nope, it doesn't have highend audio
... but, it's a darned decent machine for under $300

Re:How 'bout a "decent" system

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you going to store your data?

Geforce 3 + linux = waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

why bother with a gf3 on linux? might as well put some crap card on there. not enough games to be worth your time. Only if you dual boot windows.

Yes, it does rock

[pirodude]

I have basically the same system, with a ti200 instead of the 500, and it does infact, rock.

Geforce? With NVidia drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, the NVidia drivers aren't free. Secondly they are as unstable as a alpha of win95.

Re:Geforce? With NVidia drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow you are stupid.

the Linux drivers are More stable than windows it's self.

Only bill gates's love monkey would say what you did.

It can even be heard up here in Wisconsin...

[hendridm]

All this and still under 140 decibels.

Hell, what about the BIOS and HD Firmware?

[DAldredge]

You don't get the source to those either...

Re:Hell, what about the BIOS and HD Firmware?

[efgbr]

And not for your TV either...

The drivers for your video card would be useful, and the poster even gave you an example.

What does Linux have to do with it?

[gpinzone]

I don't get it. I've seen "dream" systems before, but what's the tie in with Linux? I mean, a fast system is a fast system. Who cares what OS you're running?

Oh wait. I see. This is the best system you can get with peripherals that have Linux drivers. Well, that narrows it down a bit.

Re: What does Linux have to do with it?

[hendridm]

For those of us who would gladly sacrifice speed for near perfect system stability and compatibility, I think articles detailing specific OS-hardware compatibility are important. This article did not strictly focus on that, however, but targetted those who wanted to drool over something they will not be able afford. Overall, I'm still not entirely sure which components I would by, with compatibility in mind, if I were to build a new Linux system.

And I'll die before I purchase another board with a VIA chipset in it. I've been told they're good with games, but I've had FAR too many stability problems, dating back to the K6 chips to newer Thunderbirds, and the stability on all was crap. And, yes, I always read the hardware guides before I buy a new system and usually buy the boards that are recommended. I work with video - give me Intel (and give me Windows, I suppose, at least until they port VirtualDub to the Macintosh or Linux).

Re:What does Linux have to do with it?

[Jacek Poplawski]

I don't get it. I've seen "dream" systems before, but what's the tie in with Linux? I mean, a fast system is a fast system. Who cares what OS you're running?

It is important what system you want to install there. It's becouse device drivers. And that's the reason NVidia is bad choice.

Re:What does Linux have to do with it?

[jrockway]

Yup. Lots of critical hardware not supported by Linux. Important things like, well I can't think of any right now. Oops, sorry.

I have an iMac of all things, and Linux runs flawlessly. Even on the supposed ultra-proprietary hardware.

Re:What does Linux have to do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh wait. I see. This is the best system you can get with peripherals that have Linux drivers."

Well .. I thought so too, and I read it to see what gfx card they recommended since I'm very dissapointed with the NVidia card I currently have in my box, but all they mentioned was some ATI card that didn't even have linux drivers (yet) and NVidia .. grrr... that sucks...

Re:What does Linux have to do with it?

[budgenator]

I'm not an expert on these things, but my understanding was that these proprietary drivers often add an additional layer to the OS and generaly slowed things down a bit.

If a card was well supported by conforming to the published standards, it didn't need a propietary driver and in most cases should be expected to run faster using the OSes built-in, highly stable and well-tested drivers in both Linux® and Windows®.

In a dream system the goal is maximum concurency of tasks. You get that by the CPU doing CPU tasks, the modem doing modem tasks, the hardrive controller doing the hardrive tasks as well as the video card doing the video tasks. When the card lacks intellegence and forces the CPU to help out, things tend to get slower and glitchy.

I've seen Windows applications crash and burn on launch, because of non-standard OEM drivers

POS HSF

[linzeal]

Cost: Thermaltake Dragon Orb 3 - $20.00

Anyone use these things? If you get a hardon for those window kits and want to show off these are fine. If you actually want to cool/overclock these are POS. Did they get paid by thermaltake to use all their products I mean listen to this, "Other supplies we'd like to mention all come from one company, Thermaltake. Thermaltake is a total cooling solutions company and provide the best products for many of those extra cooling jobs." WTF? For anyone interested in some real cooling for about 20 bucks more and peice of mind the damn fan won't die check out this. I have no comment on the memory coolers as they give a whole whopping 1 degree celsius of difference in tests I've seen. Were these people stunned stupid into liking shiny impractical things?

Re:POS HSF

[Anonymous Coward]

try the sk-6 all copper with a delta 7000 rpm..you can hear my hsf two doors down, but damn does it ever cool. i turn off my ac in the summer!

Re:POS HSF

[hmallett]

Yep, I bought the 4900rpm version (A1132) for my parents' machine - as it's mentioned that it's the low noise version. The 7000rpm version must be like a jet plane taking off, because it's so loud it's really annoying. Now, how can I get my parents to stump up 4 times the price for a NoiseControl Silverado.....? At least I didn't get a memory cooler :-)

Re:Eddie Gentry, Sad Vicitim of Slashdot

[svara]

heh, this is one of the best troll stories i've ever read - if you wrote it yourself, you have some talent :) too bad you waste it on slashdot trolling...

Ultimate -Linux- System?

[FortKnox]

I only have one question:

How is something the ultimate Linux system, and not the ultimate AnyOS system?

Now I know this is a troll, but jesus, people! Writing an article and slapping "Linux" on it to make a slashdot article? Its pretty pathetic!

Re:Ultimate -Linux- System?

[gmhowell]

Slashdot is pretty pathetic lately. Just read your own journal:)

BTW, regarding anyone who wants to 'reinvent' slashdot. Why bother? From the handful of journals I've been reading, seems that much of the good comments and stories happen there. It's even better than the hidden sid's.

Re:Ultimate -Linux- System?

[gid]

fact #1: Not all hardware that works under Windows, works and has good support/drivers under Linux.

fact #2 Almost all hardware that works under Linux will work under Windows.

So with that being said, the hardware picked all has Linux users in mind because of fact #1, so therefore, the ultimate Linux system. You can probably use this same hardware for windows due to fact #2.

So what would you call it? "The ultimate System that can be used with Linux and probably Windows"?

NVidia is not for Linux

[Jacek Poplawski]

NVidia is worst choice for Linux. You should try Voodoo, Matrox or ATI. If you choose NVidia you can't use Xv/OpenGL or you must use closed source module!
And if you don't need Xv/OpenGL - why the hell you want spend so much money to Geforce??? Or is it just system for "dual boot" ? So don't call it best for Linux!

Re:NVidia is not for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats right so erase Linux and install windows and play some games!

Re:NVidia is not for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

NVidia is worst choice for Linux. You should try Voodoo, Matrox or ATI. If you choose NVidia you can't use Xv/OpenGL or you must use closed source module!

I know what you mean. There is something about the feeling of staring at c driver code that just gets me rock hard.
My friends and I will sit around with our pants around our ankles
"Dude, check it out. Look at that iow() call right there"
Jerk, Jerk, Jerk
Ahh, the thrills!

Re:NVidia is not for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

haha i said the same thing in another post, but not quite as elogantely. +1 FUNNY!

Re:NVidia is not for Linux

[barole]

Show me a platform with good OpenGL performance based on open-source drivers. Unfortunately, there aren't any.

Re:NVidia is not for Linux

[The Man]

Sun Creator3d. Fast as hell, all Free software in xfree86 and ther kernel. Did I mention fast as hell?

Re:NVidia is not for Linux

[gid]

My Nvidia GF2 GTS card is really solid with the binary nvidia drivers, with pretty darn good performance at that. I definitely wouldn't mind a GF3 though. :)

I don't know why every complains about nvidia cards and their closed source drivers, I've yet to have a problem with them.

The system could have been better if...

[Anonymous Coward]

This system would have been a lot better if they ditched the Athlon XP and replaced it with a dual Athlon MP system. Single processor boxes are just don't scale as well. Get one application that has bad thread handling and it can bring your computer to a crawl. But a dual will usually give you enough power to pull outta it.

What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I'll get flamed for this, so I'm going AC. ;)

What's the point of a Linux-based powerhouse with a GF3 Ti500? I mean, you have what, 5 games to choose from? If I'm going to spend that much money on a video card, I'm certainly not going to be using it under Linux anywhere near its full potential. I'd rather stick it in my Win2k box and play some sweet Wolfenstein or Medal Of Honor.

Great system and all, but frankly, I don't need that much gaming power under the "stability" of Linux.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

big pussy. dont worry, plenty of us have already made this comment. and I would have made it under a username, if I had one. but i dont, because everything i have to say is either trollish or the linux zealots dont want to hear facts.

Re:What's the point?

[Warin]

I know it's been said already, but RtCW has a Linux port that you can grab, so long as you own the full version of the game.

Perhaps once I've benchmarked it under Windows and Linux, I'll have post an article giving the results. Nice part of being fairly OS neutral is that I wont be tempted to make Linux look best!

Re:What's the point?

[The Man]

And what are the facts, exactly? That windows is a steaming heap of horse shit that's not really good for anything? That vendors haven't bothered to make your 31337 g4m3Z available on Linux? That FreeBSD sucks monkey balls on SMP? That Solaris is dog-slow on even the most expensive hardware on earth? All those are FACTS. None of them are anything people really want to hear, because, frankly, everyone already knows all of them. Sure, the linux zealots don't want to hear it. Neither do windos zealots or any other kind of people, period. It's not interesting. So save us all the trouble and don't post.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

the better question would be "What is YOUR point?". Stop acting like games CAN'T be played in Linux. RtCW rocks in Linux, Quake3 and TA rock in Linux, Counter-Strike Rocks in Linux, etc, etc, etc... The list is a lot larger than some of you think, and you can get a lot more of the older games to play under Wine than you can make work under XP...

nvidia linux stability

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone else here had their xserver lockup with the 23.13 drivers from nvidia. For me this happens pretty much every time after about 10 minutes in 3d mode. I know at least some people are having the same problems from different message boards. How many other people here have had this problem?

Re:nvidia linux stability

[Anonymous Coward]

Disable AGP 4X and/or sidebanding and try again.

ultimate webserver...

[edrugtrader]

to bad they didn't use the box to host their site.

/.'d in 2 minutes....

Re:ultimate webserver...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not the box that's their bottleneck, dipshit

more than adequately -- that's the point

[DrSkwid]

..

Seems the sight is /.ed

[TheViffer]

I guess they weren't running this "powerhouse" as there web server.

Doesn't speak to well for a web site that does articles on high performance linux hardware, or so it says.

Who cares if it's a blatant ad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too slashdotted to see the damn thing anyway.

How About Guide to Cheap but Adequate System?

[alacqua]

Although the link seems to be slashdotted, I've read a few "Ultimate Linux Box" articles including one on slashdot recently. That one is apparently a sequel to another article Eric Raymond wrote in 1996 which discusses building a Linux box on the cheap. Since that would now be out of date, I'm wondering if there are other articles/advice on building or buying a cheap linux box.

Since I am not much of a hardware guy, I'd be more interested in questions like where is it essential to spend a little money. For example, if one only wants reasonable performace and would be developing only for hobby and self-education, is one of the cheap Celeron systems OK or will it bite me in the ass down the line that I don't have a Pentium? And if I would also need to boot Windows for work related stuff, does that change my minimum hardware requirements?

Anybody have any links or advice?

Re:How About Guide to Cheap but Adequate System?

[froseph]

thedukeofurl.org has a linux buyers guide.

Re:How About Guide to Cheap but Adequate System?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending what you mean by cheap, you can construct a very respectable Athlon system for less than $500, sans monitor. I've always spent money on three things: motherboard, memory and processor. The other items I look at and see how cheaply I need to go to fit within my budget. My current system has a TNT2 video card, SB16 sound card,etc... nice cards, but not bleeding edge.

Mirror????

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone got a mirror for this article so I can read it?

You'd figure a site like http://www.linuxhardware.org would be able to handle lots of traffic. :)

-Dan

Nice system...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet KDE and GNOME still run like shit on it.

Depends on how you describe "ultimate"

[Stiletto]

Clearly this system is in no way "ultimate" in terms of price/performance, reliability, or open-ness of software and hardware.

It would be educational to see what system LinuxHardware could come up with with a $1000 spending cap, and a requirement that it reach a 60-day uptime under constant use.

Re:Depends on how you describe "ultimate"

[lanalyst]

For XMas, I built a more modest version of linuxhardware's version: xp1600+, soyo d+, 512MB PC2100 DDR, MSI GF3 ti200, plextor 24/10/40 CDRW, antec 400W PSU, HSF. I had a case and a maxtor 60GB IDE drive already for it. I spent $900 with burn-in and shipping.

They chose all scsi, which is a bit over the top IMO - the dragon+ has 4 IDE controllers for 8 devices (2 of which are promise raid which can run as normal ide for linux). The PC2400 memory is overspec for the board (unless you want to boost the FSB beyond 148).

RH7.2 installed without a hitch - lan and audio drivers found and installed no problem. cdrecord is happy with the CDRW - no configuration there. I installed nvidia's drivers and have full opengl - that did require a kernel recompile (because of the the athlon I think). lm_sensors is working, etc. All on a board that was released in November - says a lot about the state of linux drivers.

Point is, I believe I have a rock solid system that by any measure meets price/performance/value.

I can also run the FSB at 143 reliably which shows the cpu/mem benchmarking as a xp 1800+. The geforce 3 ti200 can be overclocked to come close to a ti500 (the MSI driver provides overclocking in the windows driver - a linux version -nvclock - is available at http://209.167.100.83/ (evil3d).

I'm satisfied.

OS OS and MS CS OS [RE:GeForce? Feh.]

[alacqua]

There must be at least one more meaning for OS which you could fit in the same paragraph, or at least another two letter acronym ;)

Not even close

[A nonymous Coward]

I use free-as-in-speech software because I have been burnt too many times by closed source software which changes in ways I don't want, or doesn't change in ways I do want, or goes out of business, or changes its licensing model, or doesn't keep up with the times and won't work with newer software. Etc etc etc.

I WILL NOT be burned by proprietary software again if I can help it!

As a semi-aside, my original disgust for Microsoft was the patronizing "we know what you want" attitude of their software. Then of course there was the bugginess of it. I also grew to loathe their business non-ethics. A few years ago, a wonderful job went away when some vulture capitalists would not fund a friend's startup "because M$ would dup the effort and we wouldn't get our money back". And since then M$ has compounded all reasons for disgust. However, all this disgust for M$ is not why I use free source software; it's because I don't want to ever again be trapped in proprietary software over which I have no control.

Re:Not even close

[HiThere]

You left out licensing issues. Borland is pretty good about their licenses. Something that's intended as a tool doesn't need to be distributable. (They still have the product obsolescence problem that you were talking about, but that's distinct.)

At one time the MS license allowed one to use a single copy of the software both at home and at work. That's long in the past, though. The recent licenses have started from you need one license per computer and gotten more restrictive from there. They are clearly headed toward "you need to buy one license per computer per year" or possibly even something as predictable as "as often as we say". This is totally unacceptable to me.

It is remarkable just how many people believe that the way to deal with unjust licenses is to ignore them. This only works for awhile, however. If you have agreed to terms, and the software evolves to enforce them, then you have no protection at all. Being dependent on software that uses that kind of license, then, is quite short-sighted. A court might not enforce an unduly restrictive contract, but if the product self-enforces (e.g., disables itself after so much time), then it is unlikely to order the manufacturer to fix the problem, and if it did, so much time and expense would pass during the trial and the appeals that you would be out of business before the matter reached its conclusion. And then the matter would be declared moot. "There's nobody to complain, so there's no complaint."

If corporations are people, then this is murder. Premeditated. But there's no prosecution for this kind of murder. (Well, I deny the hypothesis, but that's the way the logic looks to me.)
.

crank the ignorance dial all the way to 11 please

[Afrosheen]

I think your framerate is gonna be a hell of alot faster on the Geforce3 if that's all your concerned about. Also RTCW supports compressed textures (read: detail), Trueform, vertex shading, hardware t&l, etc. The Geforce3 is nice but realistically, not many games really cater to it yet.

Besides, does it matter how old games are? It's the popularity. Look at how old Half Life is, and it still rocks and has a huge following. Until something comes along to kick it's ass and be the 'next big thing', those games are still used as the mark of quality. Games like Max Payne are great for awhile but if you can't keep playing it online, people forget about it.

So there you have it. The most popular FPS games are available on linux or can be run under wine/winex. Dispel the myth, drown the FUD.

Didn't one . . .

[OverlordQ]

of the 'Ultimate Linux' machines 'crash' alot because of a conflict with the soundcard?

SB Live! if I remember right.

Re:Didn't one . . .

[CjKing2k]

I dunno, my SB PCI512 worked just fine (except for MIDI), and it has the same chipset and uses the same kernel module as SB Live. It was the damn p.o.s. Radeon that kept crashing my X server (not to mention it's OpenGL support sucked).

Re:Didn't one . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

There was conflict was between the sblive and certain via chipsets. It happened under windows also if I remember correctly.

NVidia Source Code is Available

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck are you talking about?! NVidia provides full source code for their linux drivers. Just download them from the driver page!

They are just not GNU licensed. So I guess we can't upgrade them ourselves. Big friggin deal, I'd rather the HW manufaturer did that anyway. The Kernel hackers can still see what's going on in the code, for debugging purposes.

This is a big NON-ISSUE.

Re:NVidia Source Code is Available

[Snowfox]

What the heck are you talking about?! NVidia provides full source code for their linux drivers. Just download them from the driver page!

They are just not GNU licensed. So I guess we can't upgrade them ourselves. Big friggin deal, I'd rather the HW manufaturer did that anyway. The Kernel hackers can still see what's going on in the code, for debugging purposes.

They do not provide the full source. They provide what amounts to a bunch of stub functions which link to closed-source binaries.

This is akin to saying that Microsoft gives full source because you have header files for using their libraries.

BIOS and HD Firmware use open interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

The interfaces used by the BIOS (int 15h and others) and by the hard drive (IDE, ATA-100, SCSI, etc.) are well-defined. You don't have to install closed-source drivers to use your hard drive or BIOS (Linux rarely uses the BIOS anyway).

An open-source BIOS would be helpful, because often there are bugs in the BIOS that must be worked around (Linux contains several workarounds for BIOS bugs). But since the BIOS can usually be bypassed, it's not a huge problem.

For a hard drive, there's not much point in having open-source firmware. You can already access the full functionality of the drive using open-source drivers.

With Nvidia's video cards, you can't access many of the features without using their closed-source drivers (you need to load the closed-source driver into your kernel). This can cause noticible problems, like crashes when there are driver bugs, or incompatibility with new kernel versions. Some people say it's not a problem (right now Nvidia is pretty good at fixing the bugs), but what happens when Nvidia decides their cards are obsolete, and stops providing drivers? They already did this with their 3dfx cards - not only did they stop updating the drivers, they don't even offer old ones for download.

Stability of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I'm going AC on this one too.

When we're talking desktop systems, I am getting real tired of hearing stuff like "Stability of Linux" - Windows 2000 or XP is at least as stable as linux running as a workstation/desktop!

Sure, as a server I wouldn't choose windows. I'd go for linux or a BSD... (I do have a linux server, uptime 66 days cause of a blown fuse :)

The point is, workstations/desktops are typically only on, say, max 12 hours. I can't remember last time my windows desktop machine crashed, and I am sure every one of you have the same experience. If not, well, you probably didn't set it up properly.

Anyway, I've seen the way you moderators bashes posts like mine (the ones that doesn't say linux is superior to windows). As I said I am AC, so you can just mod away.

Re:Stability of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Well please consider the cost it takes to have a stable 2000/XP system, both hardware and software. At least in Linux I can run it on a crappy Pentium with 32MB or so (not that I do) without even needing to buy the software. There's no way in hell XP would even consider letting me do that.

Mac bashers

[Steve Cowan]

It's no wonder there are so many Mac bashers here. While I'll admit I'm as much of a geek as the next guy, clearly this /. article is aimed at those who would "drool" over hardware, instead of drooling over solutions.

To put it in perspective, a system based on an Athlon XP and Nvidia Geforce card is useless on its own, without software to run on it.

Yes, there's lots of power there, but I think the ultimate Linux system is one that does what it's intended to do, not just one with all the best hardware. If the box is employed as a server, for example, then the Geforce is an irrelevant, extravagent, useless nicety. The processor's also probably not worth what you'd pay, considering you could get something a little slower for a lot less.

There are no "ultimate systems" - just ultimate solutions.

Nomination.

[saintlupus]

The article seems Slashdotted, but from the summation I can only assume that this is another desktop x86 setup.

I'd rather like to nominate the iBook as the portable Linux dream system of the year. The TiBook is a little too flimsy for a clumsy oaf like myself, but the iBook is an indestructible, lightweight, brilliantly engineered machine. There's an Apple on the outside, but even if you eschew OS X for Linux, it's still the best bang for your buck in laptops from 2001.

--saint

Low price, high uptime.

[saintlupus]

It would be educational to see what system LinuxHardware could come up with with a $1000 spending cap, and a requirement that it reach a 60-day uptime under constant use.

An iMac running OS X, would be my suggestion.

Oh, it has to run Linux? Yeah, good luck with that.

--saint

Re:Low price, high uptime.

[gmhowell]

Good luck with what? iMacs run Linux. Just ask these guys.

Re:Low price, high uptime.

[saintlupus]

Good luck with what? iMacs run Linux.

I know, and on my iMac (running YDL 2.0) it was a mess. X was crashing left and right, even on the default desktop (KDE) and without changing a whole lot of anything. I reinstalled a couple times, it didn't fix it.

OS X, on the other hand, is both significantly more stable _and_ handles most of my hardware correctly. (Linux couldn't see my Firewire CDRW, while OS X can't see my cheapass printer. Sort of a tossup.)

However, to get off the tangent, my original comment was aimed at the fellow looking for a solid *nix on a sub-$1000 machine. OS X on one of the bargain $799 iMacs is a great choice.

--saint

stability of linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Linux is stable, but touting its stability over Windows isnt so much of a big issue anymore, IMHO. Yes if you are comparing it to Win9X/ME or 3.11...but with 2000 Pro or XP Pro..I really think thats not a huge issue any more. We are having an uptime contest on our machines at my work, and I am the only Windows2000Pro box in among the "contestants". The others are running slackware and SUSE. We all rebooted our machines at the same time.... 74 days ago. And my humble Winblows box is still up and fine. And I only have 256mb, while all the linux boxes have 512mb.

ill prolly get flamed but oh well. just my 2 cents.

ultimate file server?

[Stochi]

i just bought a new file server at home with the following specs:

1 x Tyan 2640 motherboard (Athlon MP)
2 x 1800+ MP (1.5GHz) Athlon CPU
2 x ThermalRight SK-6 heatsink
2 x Delta "Black Label" fan
2 x Tekram 390U3D Dual Ultra-160 SCSI HBA
6 x Seagate 15K RPM 36GB U160 SCSI Cheetah
1 x Seagate 10K RPM 4GB LVD SCSI Cheetah
1 x Plextor 40X SCSI CD-ROM
1 x Plextor 12/10/32X SCSI CD-Recordable
1 x NetGear FA310TX 10/100Mbps NIC
1 x Trident Video (4MB, PCI)
1 x CoolerMaster ATC-400 rackmount case
4 x Crucial 256MB ECC DDR-SDRAM

it's not much on the gaming front, but damn does it crank out the dnet keys (RC5: 10.5Mkeys/s)!

i'm also very pleased with the disk throughput. each individual 15K RPM Cheetah pulls ~55MB/s. all 6 done in RAID-5 maxes the PCI bus (133MB/s). theoretically it should cap around 266MB/s (due to the 64-bit PCI bus), but i'm not sure why it doesn't. still, 100+ MB/s is pretty damned fast.

Re:ultimate file server?

[jaritsu]

Yep, thats pretty much my system.
diff: I got a set of Paliminos 1.2GHz Tbirds and twin 10k IBM SCSI 36gig drives on an adaptec 29160, stuffed inside a Lian Li. ALl black, even my plextor drives.

I use a GF3 in my rig, and the only game I own that I boot out to play is CS, but I havent done that in about a month.

I am happy with the ability to run everything I need. All compiled from scratch, all my IM needs, surfing with fresh home builds of Mozilla, openGL for Rune, Quake1/2/3 and RTCW courtesy of NVidia, ABI Word, Evolution, I never leave or reboot except to swap kernels.

Re:ultimate file server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice, but why just one NIC? I'd say you want redundance, at some degree, or at least decent availability: RAID-5, ECC, rack, etc. I'd stick in another NIC, and load-balance the throughput.

You think it's an insane idea?

Re:ultimate file server?

[Stochi]

actually, i should probably look into that. my last fileserver had an Intel 10/100 Pro+ Management card, but FreeBSD choked on it every month or so. i haven't had any problems with Linux and the NetGear cards, but it never hurts to be cautious. thanks for the suggestion.

Re:ultimate file server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your PCI video card is holding your PCI bus back, as would any 32 bit card on a 64 bit bus. That motherboard only has one PCI bus too, so if you *want* 64 bit performance you're limited to 4 (64 bit) pci boards. The newer MPX mobos have two PCI busses.

Who Cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I need a fast processor and a uber video card, for a 80X24 console running apache.

fsck that, linux is for bitches.

practice what they preach?

[gmhowell]

Maybe they should get themselves a server that doesn't get slashdotted.

I'm sure the GeForce really helped there.

Re:practice what they preach?

[Anonymous Coward]

it was ISP bandwidth problems buddy: http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/ 11/0739254

Linux is stable only because you can't do anything

[Anonymous Coward]

usefull with it other than run apache. Sure, go ahead and lets see how stable linux is with the multitude of hardware support that windows has. Win2k is absolutely the best desktop OS ever, no question about it.

Shouldn't you guys be off compiling your kernel? Go now, go.

Linux is for sucks!

Re:How 'bout a "decent" system - starting point

[yem]

Mobo with onboard sound
Duron 1300
RTL8129 ethernet
Geforce2mx
256 or 512mb RAM.
40gb barracuda iv
Ricoh 24x10x40 cd
Logitech optical mouse
pick your own keyboard, speakers and monitor

So much for Linux hardware ...

[onlyjoking]

Well, I've been trying all evening (UK time) to access this site but without success. Doesn't say much for their Linux hardware does it?

Re:So much for Linux hardware ...

[Anonymous Coward]

again, it's their ISP buddy: http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/ 11/0739254

Why are all these systems of the year x86 based?

[HanzoSan]

When x86 is the weakest design of them all.
Good for gaming perhaps, but Linux isnt really a gamers OS.

Why no Itanium based PC? Sparc? What about SCSI Raid 0, what about bandwith?

As if a Gforce3 really matters on a Linuxbox that cant even do Alpha channeling yet in the GUI, and as if it matters if you have an AthlonXP thats designed for Windows?

System of the year for a Windows user yes.
But for Linux? I could do better. When building a system you build it for the software that you run on it, not build it because everythings name brand.

Ok so lets say you run games, Thats when you need Gforce 3. (Linux users dont apply here)

Lets say you do alot of graphics manipulation, then you need perhaps another card.

Things that all users can use is alot of ram, SCSI raid, and a fast CPU, but unlike Windows Linux runs on any CPU, people always forget that.

The only problem with Itanium is its price, but for System of the year, price shouldnt be the issue.

Its a typical Windows PC system

[HanzoSan]

Seems to be designed for Windows users. I mean you have athlonXP, which is an OK cpu for gaming, but it gets totally smoked by Itanium, Sparc, and other more powerful CPUs.

Also bandwith is a major issue, speed of ram is an issue, your CPU is only as fast as your RAM and HARDDRIVE not your damn CPU.

Having alot of L2 cache would make a diffrence as well, the 3d card in Linux couldnt even be used due to the lack of games, poor driver support, and the GUI itself cant even use the card for 2d stuff like alpha channeling, Windows speeds up the GUI using 2d speed of the video card.

Beyond all of this the CPU design of x86 is just inferior to alot of other CPUs which arent x86. Take the Itanium i know its a fortune but if I'm going to call something system of the year, and its a Linux box not a Windows box, why would i care if its compatible with x86 based Windows applications and games?

Thats what Windows users care about mostly.

Linux users want a powerful workstation to run powerful applications, or they want a server, but for gaming Windows is the only option.

I agree unreservedly

[digital_gh0st]

You've captured my thoughts in a nutshell. My brother just forked out a few thousand for a new WinOS machine with a 1.4 pentium chip and 64mb nVidia graphics card. Sure, there are places and times you may need / want these peripherals, along with some extra RAM, but I'm running the latest build of Debian on a very stable Pentium 100 with 32mb of RAM. Without installing Linux, this machine would've been made redundant (indeed it was, for several years), however buy using Debian I've not only taught myself something, but made a powerful computer that ultimately can perform tasks my brother's new PC can't, especially in regards to serving, routing and the like. With Windows, this machine's hardware would not be used to it's optimum, so I'm thankful to Linux that I have an extra PC at my disposal

Re:I agree unreservedly

[ackthpt]

In the near future I'll be building a desktop system, maybe Lindows will help in that regard, but plan to dual boot if that's my only option. I currently do my Windows stuff on a Sony Vaio laptop with 300MHz Pentium. It's a dog with Win98, but I look forward to what I'll be able to do if I can move all my windows crap off it and install Linux. With the CPU speed it should do some things nicely, rather than the utter torture of doing anything with Win98. I think there's some sort of Moore's Law thing which applies to versions of windows, i.e. for each version multiply RAM needs by 2. 64 Meg has been fine for my SparcIPX and that's what the laptop has, though I could expand to 128 if I pay Sony's extortion price for proprietary laptop RAM (and battery since that died a couple months ago, I run off the adapter atm)

Re:I agree unreservedly

[Anonymous Coward]

im running 64 megs of ram on a 350 mhz with windows 2000..runs great. Tried a 300 mhz with 64 megs of ram and kde AND also tried gnome. Apps were SLOW SLOW SLOW. linux desktop is not ready for prime time

The people who build the PC prolly dont use Linux

[HanzoSan]

I mean its all wrong.

First, any machine I'm designing for Linux, 2 most important things will be.

Ram, Its going to have at least a gig.
Harddrive must be SCSI raid, or fibre channel array.

4 Harddrives in Raid0 mode transfering data at about over 200 megs a second, and a gig of ram. The next thing you will need is good motherboard which can handle the bandwidth.

And when choosing a motherboard you'll need a Good CPU. THE best but most expensive is the Itanium, the sparc CPUs seem better designed to handle the bandwidth than the AthlonXP, Sparc CPU has about 8 megs of L2 cache, and top it off with a high quality harddrive such as the Cheetah Series from Seagate, the one with the 16 megs of vcache is the best one (the one i use)

With this you'll have the most speed possible because you wont have any bottlenecks.

Stupid to have a fast CPU and slow ram.
Stupid to have a slow CPU and fast ram.

Stupid to have a gaming card which cant be used (Gforce3)

Stupid to have a slow harddrive and fast everything else.

And last, if you are going to use linux, theres no rule saying you must use X86 based CPU, but if you do, you'd be better off with Xeons or AthlonMP over the XP series of Athlon.

Dual processing power really helps when dealing with 3d graphics and photoshop effects.

AHA! You are one of the army of KDE/Gnome Bashers

[HanzoSan]

Sure linux can run with a weak machine, you just cant run powerful software. You can run weak software and add plugins as needed. So tell me are you running blackbox? afterstep?

No this is not a flamebait, or a troll post. I'm simply sayin when you have a machine like this, you dont have the right to say KDE or Gnome or Enlightenment is slow.

Dutch railways are blocking non-IE users

[Pussy Is Money]

This warrants the brief attention of /.; if not in a story, then in this fashion.

The Dutch railway company is blocking non-IE users. Pass it on and submit a complaint. Thanks.

Linux is stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that why I can't attach to shared memory, sendmail crashes, and machines need to be rebooted because of esoteric errors? Oh, ok. cool.

stability of linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're joking, right?

try FreeBSD on for size.

Budget box, maybe. Ultimate box definitely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ultimate" Linux box, and it only has one CPU?!?
No SCSI RAID?!? The "ultimate" Linux box (excluding big Sun servers) would be something like a dual AthlonMP, or a 4+-way Xeon, with Ultra320 SCSI RAID, and/or a fibre-channel SAN.

Why the hype? Is Linux Hardware /.'s new sponsor?

Linux has lots of games.

[Zapdos]

For those who said who needs a $3oo dollar graphics card
the answer is almost No home user. But if you want to play there are more games available then just a couple.

Ever play with openuniverse?
Maybe you want to write a fast game using sdl or gl?

or just play a game
http://www.lokigames.com/products/
http://www.happypenguin.org/
http://www.tuxgames.com/
Quake even gets higher frame rates when using linux.

This is really "the ultimate"?

[bingeldac]

There were far mor advances in 2001 that really should have been mentioned. The biggest I can think of is the introduction of SMP for Athlon based systems. Granted the Tyan thunder K7 is pricey (includes dual channel scsi), but while you are getting scsi, a *nice* case, expensive power supple and the like, it makes sense to go ahead and shell out the bucks for a SMP system. The only downfall to all of this would be that the Tyan Thunder SMP Athlon board would not fit inside the case so it would require an upgrade to a larger case. Oh yeah and through on a SoundBlaster Audigy as well. That would be a more ultimate system.

Oh yeah the Tyan Tiger MP (S2460) is a newer board that does not have SCSI and is priced at around $230.00.

3+ good titles

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake 3
Unreal Tournament
Tribes2
Heavy Gear 2
RTCW

There's five.

Now for something completely different...

[bihoy]

Actually, this dream machine shares a lot in common with the "Ultimate Linux Box" as described by Eric Raymond here back in November. I must admit that Raymonds selections appeal to me a whole lot more. You couldn't possibly get me to give up Antec cases and Tyan motherboards. They are like Mom's Apple pie and ice cream. You've known they are so good for so long why even consider anything else.

Re:Now for something completely different...

[Ziviyr]

Well, sounds fine until youy see how cool your sister's apple pie is, doubling as an orbital laser.

The old folks just don't get it... :-)

Re:The people who build the PC prolly dont use Lin

[Anonymous Coward]

You're on crack.
"Hard drive must be SCSI RAID or fibre channel array".

*Why*? Sure, for specialized stuff like heavy duty file servers, this makes sense, but why for your own personal computer? So your file copies go slightly faster?

And you can get an Itanium, SPARC, etc when Linux on the Itanium and SPARC is as tweaked an optimized as vanilla x86 Linux. Waay more people and more core developers are x86 people -- guess where performance has been worked on the most. Much as I dislike Solaris relative to Linux, if I were going SPARC, that's where I'd be.

"Stupid to have a fast CPU and slow RAM"
"Stupid to have a slow CPU and fast RAM".
Oh, get real. Completely depends on what you're doing. If it's a Renderman array, no, the RAM speed is not an issue. If you're just doing massive matrix multiplications, then the RAM is probably the bottleneck. And frankly, the difference in RAM speed you can be getting with a given type of processor is not that significant.

I'm not a big fan of Nvidia because their Linux driver support is a lot more half-assed than Matrox (who does fully open source drivers and has support for new features way before Nvidia does). But if you want to play Tribes 3 at some silly res like most hard core gamers seem to do, then I suspect that that GeForce 3 is not going to go to waste.

"Dual processing power really helps when dealing with 3d graphics and photoshop effects"

What the hell are you talking about? Photoshop in WINE, maybe? If you're talking about Linux, presumably you mean GIMP and povray. Povray *does* have a hack to let it run in multiple threads to use multiple processors (though Povray wasn't exactly architected around MP), but the GIMP's filters are all (that I know of) single-threaded.

Morons

[Perdo]

Did they forget the flaw in the via chipset thet prevents any PCI scsi controller from exceeding 60mb/s? Adaptec/cheetah combo is a complete, utter waste of effort on that board.

Re:Morons

[bingeldac]

Is this true of the onboard scsi on the Tyan boards?

Re:Morons

[Perdo]

Motherboards equipped with VIAs chipsets do not offer the full performance specified for PCI. This problem affects both new cards with Ultra-ATA/133 controllers and fast SCSI setups.

the register's take

Tyan makes some via chipset motherboards but you may be talking about the dual AMD tyan motherboard that uses the AMD 760MP chipset. It has no problems at all unlike the AMD 760mpx chipset that has absolutely completely broken usb support

Hear hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with the sentiment. As jwz so succinctly put it:

See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy. I don't get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card. As far as I'm concerned, that crap is a solved problem, and not worth revisiting. That's like banging rocks together and being proud that you've re-derived fire from first principles. It's boring.

And while he was talking about the usability of Linux (which I still think pretty much sucks in many ways) back in 1998, I believe that sentiment applies to hardware as well. I hate dealing with stupid IRQ conflicts and other idiotic reliability problems most x86-based hardware has.

Give me a Mac, give me a Sun, give me an x86 manufacturer who actually puts together systems where I don't have to worry about anything more than how to get the cover off to (easily!) add more RAM or a bigger disk. (Ha. Only Dell comes closest there and I'm still not really impressed with their kit.)

Unless you can dedicate the time to chasing hardware conflicts or you're planning to do a lot of research constantly to find out what particular PC parts are good and which are crap, PCs are generally a good way to waste a lot of time that you could be using for solving worthwhile problems. In general I want to plug my computer in, turn it on, maybe install an OS, and just have it work so I can get to hacking.

Games, of course.

[cduffy]

My GeForce 3 Ti500 is put to quite good use running Loki's port of Tribes 2 (at 1600x1200).

Re:AHA! You are one of the army of KDE/Gnome Bashe

[castlan]

HanzoSan, I disagree - your post is definitely flamebait, and it should be moderated as such. Nowhere did digital_gh0st even mention KDE, GNOME, or windowmanagers in general. It is difficult to see why you would respond with accusations of bashing specific UI enviroments, when the poster is probably not even running an X server on the Pentium 100 Debian box.

You are also off the mark when you say "powerful" software. The term you are looking for is "bloated" software. With a less powerful machine, it is unpleasant to run bloated software. Powerful and weak are subjective terms, but they don't seem to fit your usage of the word. Does "weak" software even allow you to add plugins? "Powerful" software doesn't necessarily even use graphics... many would say that powerful software needs only a command line.

-castlan

two words: Multi Head!

[Xylantiel]

I firmly believe that anyone who creates an "ultimate" linux system with only one display must have something wrong with them. What about a great display? Like 3 pci based video cards that play nice together and some whopper LCD panels?

And I should note that there are two more words that they should think about after that: multi PROCESSOR!

And my opinion on this system -- nice decoration, but PC boxes belong in the CLOSET!!

The stability of Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stability of Linux? Shudder!
Thank god there are systems like NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris (yet) or even OS/2.

All I want is silence

[Zo0ok]

I can't help it, but as a non-gamer I find all computers on the market today more than sufficient for my needs. Any CPU that I can buy brand new is enough. Memory is more or less free, and 512 Mb is more than I've ever needed. A 20Gb hard drive makes it. Most graphics adapters can do 1600x1200x85.

I just want something that is "completely" silent. My Mac G4 is not silent. My IBM Thinkpad is not silent. The Sun Blade 100 at my work is not silent.

There was an article a few days ago on Slashdot telling how to build a quiet performance PC. I believe dropping "performance" could make it even more silent.

How do I build a machine (to run my favorite free os) that is completely silent?

Re:All I want is silence

[Hoser McMoose]

Well, a good place to start is to identify where the noise is coming from. In a PC this is generally three places: CPU Heatsink fan, power supply fan and hard drives.

For the CPU heatsink fan, the best way to silence the thing is to use a CPU that doesn't need a fan. The only currently available chip that comes to mind here is the VIA Cyrix III. Sure, this chip is quite a bit slower then a Celeron or a Duron, but as you said, performance wasn't your top criteria.

For the power supply fan, you could try getting rid of this altogether to, however your best bet would probably be to get a power supply that uses a relatively large, slow spinning fan. The PC Power and Cooling fan mentioned is one option, though you could probably get just about any power supply out there and simply replace the fan with a quiet, slow spinning fan instead. Pabst is known for making some very quiet fans, or just a plain old ~2000-2500rpm 80mm Panasonic fan should do the trick.

For hard drives, obviously some 15K rpm SCSI drives are out of the question. The quietest common drive out there today, according to Storage Review's Testbed3 is the Seagate U6 5400rpm IDE drive. For a higher performance drive, Seagates Baracuda IV drives get top marks for low-noise. Beyond that, you can further reduce drive noise by putting the hard drive into a drive sleeve type thing (put a 3.5" drive into a sound-proof casing that fits in a 5.25" drive bay).

After all of this is done, you should have yourself a VERY quiet system. Will it be truly and totally silent? No, obviously not, but hopefully it should be quiet enough for your tastes. At the very least it's likely to be about the quietest PC (meaning x86) you can get.

Re:All I want is silence

[joss]

If you only want to run linux it's trivial:
build an X terminal with a slow fanless CPU and no disk (boot from floppy) and a fanless power supply.

Put your real PC somewhere else. Make it as bad ass and noisy as you like.

Re:AHA! You are one of the army of KDE/Gnome Bashe

[HanzoSan]

Bloat is only called "Too many features" Because your computer cant handle it all.

Plugins and configure your bloat. Or have every feature turned on. When you have a fast machine with more than enough power, does it make a diffrence how many features as on when the program loads instantly? Why not turn them all on and use them when needed?

Re:The people who build the PC prolly dont use Lin

[HanzoSan]

"Why*? Sure, for specialized stuff like heavy duty file servers, this makes sense, but why for your own personal computer? So your file copies go slightly faster?"

Ever used a file sharing program downloaded about 5 gigs worth of files in a matter of days and need to organize them all? Of course not.

Ever encode an ogg, mp3. mpeg4 divx or anything? Of course you havent. Ever tried encoding a few hundred files all at the same time while downloading by the gigs and playing a game of quake? Oh of course not. You need RAID if you are going to be dealing with gigs of files and as we now have the ability to download by the gig, its time to have harddrives which can handle alot of data movement with some speed, no one wants to wait all day for a file to copy, delete etc etc. Some people want instant speed.

"Oh, get real. Completely depends on what you're doing. If it's a Renderman array, no, the RAM speed is not an issue. If you're just doing massive matrix multiplications, then the RAM is probably the bottleneck. And frankly, the difference in RAM speed you can be getting with a given type of processor is not that significant."

Right it does matter what you are doing, but this isnt about building a very specialized box, its about building the fastest machine possible. Fast machines are fast because they have NO bottlenecks. The machine i described would be an all around fast machine, and perfect for a serious desktop user. Yes some people DO use linux on the desktop, and some people DO like to have speed.

"
And you can get an Itanium, SPARC, etc when Linux on the Itanium and SPARC is as tweaked an optimized as vanilla x86 Linux. Waay more people and more core developers are x86 people -- guess where performance has been worked on the most. Much as I dislike Solaris relative to Linux, if I were going SPARC, that's where I'd be."

Good point, it may be optimized for x86, so compile the software yourself so its optimized for your hardware, then run it. Usually theres source code which works on just about everything(like mozilla for example) and can be optimized slightly.

"What the hell are you talking about? Photoshop in WINE, maybe? If you're talking about Linux, presumably you mean GIMP and povray. Povray *does* have a hack to let it run in multiple threads to use multiple processors (though Povray wasn't exactly architected around MP), but the GIMP's filters are all (that I know of) single-threaded."

Gimp, Photoshop, you get the point. Anyhow graphics manipulation programs run faster with dual processors.

As far as Gforce3, linux cant even fully use Gforce2

You make a few good arguements but this is assuming that you are using the PC, I assumed nothing, the PC example i gave is simply the best PC that can be built for pure SPEED, its not the more powerful, its just the best PC you can have for speed on the desktop.

You can of course add a ton of CPUs and make a PC for some specific calculations and have it be faster, but it wont be faster all around.

Re:GeForce? Feh. (Reverse engineering the drivers)

[Anonymous Coward]

Is somebody working on that?

The Windows Memory Law :

[da5idnetlimit.com]

-As for RAM, you will alway need N+16 Mo RAM, where N is the amount you have as of today.-

This rule always proved true 8)

Re:The Windows Memory Law :

[ackthpt]

At work i'm running Win98SE with 512MB and it runs out of memory frequently. I've always suspected that the OS preloads in all sorts of libraries if it sees there's lots of memory. While this may make some apps appear very fast, when you load them the first time, because they don't have to load all the DLLs, it's a pain, because we put the memory in for other apps, not to feed Window's appetite.

Re:Why are all these systems of the year x86 based

[nuintari]

Yeah, I couldn't disagree more with your statement regarding Linux not doing games. My current favorite four games run in Linux, often better than on my windows 2000 machine. My Linux box has a geForce 2 MX in it, my windows box has an ati 8 MB rage pro something. Guess which is the better video card? And yes, I put it in my Linux box, I get better performance out Quake 3 Arena in Linux.

The Linux Gamer market may be a niche inside a niche, but were there, and we can be just as loud as annoyingly bad starcraft players on Battle.Net

fact 2?

[budgenator]

I have a dual-boot machine and the Windows® 95A side absolutely chocks on the installed modem card, and has developed what I think are BIOS related problems, (P 90MHz ISA system) but my Linux® side of the machine runs fine at least for a P90.

Last Years Dream System

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be nice to see last years dream system and what it cost then, and maybe a list of what those same items cost now. My linux box is still a p166 and I get along just fine, I am sure I would be able to do with last years top of the line dream machine, I just want to see what the price diff is. Maybe linuxhardware.org is reading and can put that article back up.

Budget Box of 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

Linuxwatch.org has the budget system of 2001 up, $399 total cost.. http://www.linuxwatch.org/article.php?sid=35

Re:GeForce? Feh. (Reverse engineering the drivers)

[Snowfox]

Is somebody working on that?

ATI, probably. :)

There is an open-source nvidia driver (nv) project under way. It doesn't support many things like the DVI-D output, and it's slower than the nvidia driver. I'm not in any way involved, so I don't know whether they've had a look at the nvidia drivers. I'd expect there would be legal problems in doing so, however.

Anyone know for sure?

it amazes me that someone could SAY that about ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Just goes to show how times change. The reason Linux and I had our little falling-out was waiting entirely too long for X drivers that worked on my Rage 128.

Re:AHA! You are one of the army of KDE/Gnome Bashe

[digital_gh0st]

Thanks dude, and although it wasn't too flaming, you're right in saying that I didn't mentione KDE or Gnome, and why would I. We all know the most powerful commands are run from the console (terminal) mode in Linux, Unix and other non-Win OSs that support GUI layers. :)

same problem

[da5idnetlimit.com]

98SE with 256Mo Ram (I LOVE cheap Ram 8)

Problem solved using MemTurbo 2.

Also another side effect : when using a KVM sitch with no power link (passive) Memturbo seems to get 98 to check all keyboard - video - mouse and allow you to work just after you switched.

I just love this small soft.

BTW anyone has a hint on DVD Card with a 3309 chipset + Linux ?

Re:AHA! You are one of the army of KDE/Gnome Bashe

[castlan]

Not sure if you really want an answer, but I'll post this and et you decide.

Having too many extra "features" is usually a symptom of poor design. If a feature is added to a product after the initial design, it tends to cause clutter, whether in the interface, or in the program's internal logic (read: source code). If programs have too many features added, then instability is usually introduced along with the loss of clarity. A sign of well planned and executed design is that a program's properties are inherent; it doesn't depend on extra features being added later to make the program generally useful.

A much more eloquent way of saying all of the above, "you know that it is finished when there is nothing else that needs to be taken away" - this imples that a product isn't improved when "features" are added. Rather, when the concept is simplified.

In fact, while I tend to find myself at odds with the "worse is better" philosophy, that is the philosophy that UNIX grew from. A corruption of the "less is more" sentiment, it is how Unix type systems avoid "creeping featuritis." This approach has been relatively successful until Free Software Operating Systems running XFree86 became common. Now huge bloated environments like GNOME and KDE have replaced relatively simple and purposeful Window Managers.

Even if I am using an SGI Onyx 3800 with multiple graphics pipes, multiple MIPS processors, multiple Gigs of Cache-Coherent NUMA RAM and more raw I/O capability than you could ever saturate doing productive work, there are still downsides to using bloated software. Bloated monolithic softare is not as flexible as the combination of simple modular applications that each exhibit stable and consistent behaivor. It is called The Principle of Least Suprise. Bloated monolithic software tends to have more bugs, because the are less stable interfaces to act as checkpoints. Also bloated monolithic sotware would not be as able to take maximal advantage of my killer SGI box, as it would very difficult and complex to have it run in parallel. In contrast, by running modular components in unison, the resources could be distributed more efficiently.

You may have noticed that my bloated paragrphs have been more difficult to read then if I had just made my point in a succinct and compact manner. You may have found, for example, that if one applet in the GNOME dock has locked up or is misbehahving, then the functionality of the entire dock is compromised until the problem with the misbehaving applet is resolved. The problem with bloatware, it that it causes minor problems to compound - to "bloat", if you will - until they have collectively become major problems. As a rule, the larger something grows, the more complex it become. As a system grows in complexity, more errors are introduced.

No matter how powerful your computer's hardware is, it cannot handle logic errors (read: bugs) any better than my 486dx33.

-castlan