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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

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: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: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.

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: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.