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Linuxwatch Budget System of 2001
A reader writes "Linuxwatch.org has posted their Budget System of 2001 in response to LinuxHardware's 2001 System of the year. Boasting their system is 13% of the price and plenty of power for "normal users". Running at 1.4Ghz with 256MB RAM, it doesn't seem to bad for "normal users"(whatever that means)IMHO."
The "average user" is someone who surfs the web, sends the occasional e-mail, and writes letters. And that user does not significantly benefit from a ghz-class machine. Put them on an "old" 700mhz machine from a couple of years ago, and they do just fine. More and more individuals and businesses are realizing that the computers that they already own work fine for what they do. People no longer drum their fingers waiting for programs to load, files to compress, and spreadsheets to recalculate.
Sure, there are a handful of people who really do need fast machines, but, as Apple has realized, you don't need to have ghz+ machines to satisfy the average user.
Oops, I thought they meant a watch running Linux at 1.4Ghz with 256MB RAM.
Booya! I'll take one of those.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
I'm glad they highlight the budget system. As a software developer, I find most of my desktop cycles are spare. Even builds I do on a server. Budget systems can do more now than supercomputers a few years ago.
What the computer industry really needs are some breakthroughs in software development to enhance stability and usability.
Well, when you are building Linux From Scratch four or five times a week you need something this heafty!
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
or is this just a for servers?
for the same price you can get a turtle beach - santa Cruz. nice linux support, and it beats the tar out of the soundblaster live in specs reliability and system stability. (SBLive is NOT PCI2.1 compliant and does leak noise onto the PCI bus. link about it here
Otherwise, couple that machine with a nice 15" Flat panel display and you have a nice Lan-party Box.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
These prices seem rather low, and I love the part where they say "Throw a CD-Rom, Modem and/or NIC into this box" but don't include the cost of doing so in the bottom line.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Man, that box has almost twice the juice of my best box at home. Thank heaven for work, where someone else can foot the bill for my hardware habit. Course, even an underpaid admin like me could scrounge up 400 bones.... if he wasn't married....with 2 kids....and one on the way. *sigh*
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
$55 for a radeon? Are they fucking nuts?
The last Radeon I bought was $395. What do I get for $55? A 2mb pci card?
It's interesting to see how prices for hardware continually drops while software prices (Non-free as in beer software) maintain or increase in price. The total system cost for machine listed in the article is $399..Now, let's add Windows...$99, an office suite $150, anti-virus software, $59...We've almost immediately doubled the price of the machine by merely adding functionality. This is quite possibly why people accept paying extragavant prices for software; it's a trade-off..lower prices for hardware, higher prices for software = maintain status quo of computer system pricing.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
No offense meant here but I think Linuxwatch.org needs to better define what it thinks a normal user is. In my opinion, working in the IT field myself, this would be a waste on the "normal user".
How I personally define it is the medium of all the 100+ companies users I've met over the last few years.
...if their budget system is 4 times faster than my system?
*blush in shame*
And I consider myself a geek...
My sig hates me. That's ok, I never cared for it much anyway.
Since when can a "normal" user use a PC without a monitor?
... because even the webservers don't feel like working. Linuxwatch.com has been successfully slashdotted. Anyone who got through mind posting the hardware configuration of this wonderful budget beast?
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Soyo motherboards are hard to beat. They are just as fast as any other brand, are built extremely well, and seem to be more stable than ASUS, ABIT, TYAN, MSI, and every other brand I've tried. I like 'em a lot, and my next machine will be based on a Soyo DRAGON mobo with Athlon 1900+XP. My current machine is ASUS with a VIA chipset overclocking a P-III/600(100fsb) to 800MHz(using full 133 fsb) and it seems too slow for me these days. ATI Radeon video cards rock too!!!
It's just like the AC on the site asked (paraphrasing), "Great box, where's the vendor?"
I know that the place I work for would probably buy lots of these for an appliance app we've designed and sell, if we could get decent no-hassle quick-turnaround warranty service on them.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
This is what I get:
/article.php on this server.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at www.linuxwatch.org Port 80
I know some people hate eMachines, but my two have been problem free, including one which is now more than 4 yrs old.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Well, I never got to read the first aritlce because it was slashdotted, and it looks like I won't be able to read this one. Maybe both of these sites should follow their own advice and build some beefier servers.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I like really fast systems; I simulate brain areas for a living (or, well, for a PhD), and like lots of speed. The reality is, however, that even with an application like that, I spend a very small time actually running the simulator, and most of my time in an editor, writing code, writing papers, or writing grant proposals. This system, overall, would probably make me just as happy as a biggest-bang-of-all kind of product.
The only app I can think of that would require the best PC available (and that does not simply require the fastest system) is games. You want to run really serious simulations or hardware design apps? Well, get a big workstation or a PC cluster or something. You want to run smaller stuff? Run it on an ordinary PC, maybe get a cup of coffee while it churns - or get some text written while the simulator is working.
We're approaching the inflection point where it simply does not apply to get steadily faster, more potent computers. Last years machine - or that of three years ago - will do pretty much everything you throw at it. Not even MS has been able to increase system requirements at the same speed hardware has improved for the last couple of years.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I tried to post a comment at that site, but it seems their comments system is down (slashdotted?). Anyway, I'll post it here:
I miss a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, a floppy drive and a cpu cooler (you'll need a good one with that CPU: it will not burn out your pocket, but WILL burn out itself and your motherboard if you don't cool it properly).
Furthermore, keeping a cdrom drive out of the equation isn't really honest. Almost any desktop box needs one. I don't know whether a NIC is included in the "system of the year", but this is the same as for a cdrom: almost any desktop box needs one.
I guess we can double the price for this so called budget system, because working without input and output devices (silly unneeded things like a monitor/keyboard etc) is a bit difficult.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at www.linuxwatch.org Port 80
Looks like they're /.'d, i guess it just goes to show that a budget desktop isn't a budget server.
whoa! Thanks! this may well influence my very next purchase
The site was immediately /.'d, which is alone is a fun thing to type. /.'d, /.'d, /.'d.
Seriously, just a run down on specs would be swell.
The Linux Watch website was slashdotted in 13% of the time that it took Linux Hardware. Guess that is what you get when you use cheap hardware. Next time, spend the money and get something worth using. Value not only refers to cost of the machine but the quality within.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
$55 for a radeon? Are they ... nuts?
Last time I checked, you could get a ATI Radeon video card starting at $39.
--"pine in gap" is NOT an innuendo
Will I retire or break 10K?
The site is interesting but doesn't really address the task very well. Lumping the users together and calling them average makes no sense. Every user has different needs, even M$ users do different things with their boxes. A better system might have been to rank components by price point and funtionality relative to the users' needs. Just my bit. Cheers and have a great weekend.
Nice idea, and I'd buy one if they were on sale, but it does seem to be missing a few things such as a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and most importantly a power supply (I doubt that $40 case comes with a $300 Athlon power supply). No CD-RW or DVD either, but I guess that's OK for a budget box.
Does anyone actually sell these type configurations for $500 ?
I think there system lacks any creativity. Now that you can buy all the processing power an average user needs very cheaply, why do they just make a budget system centered on performance ?
They should made a system centered on low noise or one that has good look or something other that isn't found in every system now.
What about making a small and quite system using a shuttle sv24 barebone with a passive cooled c3 ? Or a dual duron ?
And why did they just use 256 mb ? Now that ram is that cheap, they should brought at least 512 mb while that 1.4 ghz athlon isn't really needed. Or what about ECC sdram ?
Jan
"Why dont you go set some jumpers on your commodity hardware" ;)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I'm running 750 Mhz Slot A Athlon [classic] on a windoze box. This is a smoking machine even with the huge over head of XP. All the fluffy things don't seem to slow me down.
The difference seems to be the amount of ram. I've went from 128 to 384 and cut my boot time in half, so it seemed. When I dual-booted from this box, linux smoked and I've never seen a faster machine.
My linux box is simply a 333Mhz K6-2. Nothing seems to be slow there. I must admit that I don't run X, quake or etc... but it seems to be enough.
A budget system at 1.4Ghz seems to be a little much. But while we are on the subject, the amount of RAM seems to be low considering that RAM is so cheap.
I could be wrong, I can access the page.. or any page at Linuxwatch.
Get your Unix fortune now!
One weird thing that I saw, I was looking up the mobo and some of the stats on the motherboard say that it supports up to 1.2ghz cpu's and yet they're trying to put a 1.4ghz cpu into it?
Who paid slashdot to post this? This is an ad...
Now, let's add Windows...$99
full official version of Red Hat 7.2...$70. It's as easy to install as any version of Windows I've tried.
an office suite $150
Even a Windows office suite doesn't cost $150. You can get OpenOffice.org suite for only the cost of downloading 48 MB (three hours over a 56K modem).
anti-virus software, $59...
Don't overpay. Here's Norton AV 2002 for $20.
We've almost immediately doubled the price of the machine by merely adding functionality.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Does anyone have a mirror?
/article.php on this server.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at www.linuxwatch.org Port 80
Of course, it would help if the link was to a site we could access.
5 comments and already slashdotted....
Hope it wasn't running on the Machine of the Year.
I noticed the circular for my local Fry's advertised a desktop (w/o monitor) for $299 this morning. 900Mhz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD. When I looked closer, it said it was linux 1.3-based (whatever the hell that means, aren't we on the 2.4x kernel now?). The ad declared that it supported "e-mail, web browsing, and word processing", and that "Windows [was] available for additional charge". So it really does appear that these sorts of machines are being sold retail.
Good God! The server is so out of it that then ENTIRE THING is now off limits! They didn't take their server down, but it is quite a way to deal with the problem.
403: Forbidden.
Everything is mainstream now.
on such a system, because that would explain why it's /.'d all to heck. ;)
No chance of a mirror, eh? How about a Google cache?
My sigs always suck.
A few months ago I bought an ATI Radeon LE AGP 32MB for only $75 (oem white box version, no bundled games or other graphics software only the drivers cdrom), so yeah by now I bet they are available for $55.
And by the way, the ATI Radeon absolutely rocks with KDE 2.2 with all the transparency and other eye candy turned doo-dads turned on. Crystal clear sharp and smooth as silk.
Where are the classic MIPS ratings? It's a simple but fairly accurate statement on how fast a processor will go. A 486 100MHz and a Pentium 100MHz has the same MHz, but not the same MIPS.
Zodiac Survey
My Dad threw it out last year, A P75 with 32 MB and an 800 MB dirve. Its headless, but it runs slackware 8.0 and is my dns, mail server, web server, ssh server and pop mail client for the whole family. For style I spray painted it green, but ran out 3/4 of the way. Gotta love it.
Since Linuxwatch.org has blown chunks, and it appears Linuxhardware.org is still Slashdotted from yesterday, I don't have much to say.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
And I thought we were slash.
But, Hemos you should give them fair warning before you post a hardware realted article. You know we're a bunch of OCP junkies
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
That's what porn videos are
You would think they could have at least beowolfed them...
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Microsoft has done a rather decent job at increasing system requirments. Take a look at the windows xp requirments. It's amazing what you need these days.
Do it doug.
This argument gets thrown around all the time, and it's never made much sense to me.
Obviously, the reason hardware prices have gone down is because the cost of building computer components goes down over time. On the other hand the cost of expert software programmers has tended to go up because you're paying for a salary rather than a physical component. You really can't compare physical processes to intellectual resources.
...getting your nazi on
:)
i think i just pissed my pants, i'm laughing so hard.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Obviously, the reason hardware prices have gone down is because the cost of building computer components goes down over time.
.. company sells enough to cover costs, and (slowly) starts dropping the price because now they only have to worry about manufacturing costs.. If they didn't drop their prices, their competition begins to steal their marketshare.
No, the reason hardware prices go down is because hardware companies have competition
Cost to design and engineer a CPU or video card costs $X
Software company releases an OS or Office Suite, and sells enough to cover programmers time. They then see they have no competition, and decide "well, we'll just keep the price the same - we have no reason to lower our prices, because we have no competition."
Don't be fooled by mhz ratings, pure and simple.
I was benchmarking systems back when 4mhz Z80s were fast. I'm not "fooled" by mhz ratings. That's why I just used a generic term of "ghz class" rather than getting into pissing contests about whether a 1.66ghz Athlon XP was faster than a 2.0ghz Pentium 4.
But, no reputable benchmark in the world, whether MFLOPS, SPECmarks, Whetstones, Dhrystones, or something else, is going to show the new 800mhz iMac or a 700mhz PIII to be in the same class as a 1.4ghz Athlon XP.
And that's why I used a fairly generic term that everyone would understand rather than saying "the average user does not need a 2500 Dhrystone class machine."
(The article is slashdotted, so I'm assuming by your post that they chose the SBLive for the machine).
The Linux support for the Santa Cruz is nowhere near that of the SBLive.
First, the SBLive will give you hardware mixing in Linux, so there's no need to worry about which apps use which sound daemon. The CS4630 driver doesn't do this.
Second, The sound quality of the SBLive in Linux is much better than in Windows. Chalk that up to the Linux emu10k1 driver guys who have created better DSP patches for the emu10k1 than the guys at Creative.
Finally, there's no evidence that the SBLive's non-compliance has had adverse effects in any OS other than Windows, at least not that I've seen or heard. I've heard many testimonials from people with the SBLive/686B combo who have no problems in Linux.
Your gripes would've been applicable had this been a Windows box, but it isn't.
an office suite $150
Here's an interesting little secret for Mac OS and Windows users looking for a good office suite. AppleWorks 6 is only _39 dollars_ from the Apple Store for Education. Runs on Windows, Classic Mac OS, and natively on OS X. That's what I'm running on my home and work machines. And the filters for MS Office are top notch.
Come to think of it, you could buy AppleWorks instead of MS Office for your machine now, and use the money you saved on the license to buy this _entire_ budget system. And a monitor. And a NIC. And all the other parts people mention are missing from the currently Slashdotted article.
--saint
Average, yes.
But the average computer user isn't the average Linux user.
The average computer user, if using Linux for whatever reason, will be using some sort of friendlier distribution, such as RedHat or Mandrake.
RH and (As far as I know) Mandrake both come with package systems - the average computer user has very little to compile.
(And there's a big if there. The average computer user has no need for Linux, and probably shouldn't be using it. No, I'm not knocking Linux or praising (laugh) Microsoft. However, I think we all know that an improperly secured Linux box is a freakin' disaster waiting to happen. While Microsoft operating systems can almost never be made secure, they come at a certain modest level to start with, no fiddling involved. Linux? Sure, you can make it as secure as one of Saddam Hussein's bunkers, but you'll be fiddling with things that are beyond the grasp of the 'average' computer user.)
Value not only refers to cost of the machine but the quality within.
That's why I buy Apple gear. But try explaining the concept of a price premium for value to a bunch of 1337 h@x0rs living in mom's basement, running a system cobbled together from CompUSA free-with-rebate parts, an untested bleeding edge kernel grafted onto the TurboLinux install from the CD they found in the dumpster behind Barnes and Noble's.
Yeah, I know, Flamebait. I've been at the cap too fucking long anyway.
--saint
goto freshmeat.net and do a search on 'download comics'
You will get a list of apps that will automatically download hundreds of comics everyday. Run this on a cron job at the same time everyday and then browse them at your leasure.
Am I the only one getting
HTTP Error 403: Forbidden
on everything at that site?
just checking
bemis
then what do you think the odds are of getting Apple to port this to Linux? I'd buy it in a second. from reports at MacExpo, it seems like Apple is cozying up to the Linux community.
OSX is shweet all the memory protection and multi tasking. Stable and more Apps then you can shake a one butten mouse @
Since AMD stopped production of the K6 line of CPUs quite some time ago, finding older CPUs can be a bit hard. And even so they are still about equal in cost to the Duron line of proccessors.
/nearly/ cheap enough to be a better deal then a seperate video card. Integrated sound is doing good on the platform though.)
A local middle school recently got a bunch of K6-(2/3) 555mhz systems for $269 each, the best that can be done with Durons is ~$450 each.
The main advantage to the older K6 line though is the wide variety of cheap integrated Super Socket 7 motherboards that were made.
Computer prices could drop another $100-$150 if some more companies made some cheap OEM-ish integrated motherboards for the K7 line of CPUs. (the few ones that are out there are not in large supply for third party buyers and they are not
Prices would drop even further if a cheezy 1 IDE channel Make Stuff Work style Motherboard was made. You know, 2 RAM slots, 2 or 3 PCI slots, integrated AGP, etc. Heh. Yah it would suck for many causes, but damnit, I have had quite a few requests for such systems! (I do custom build jobs, most of what people want now days are e-mail terminals with a wordproccessor)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
That page seems to be slashdotted, so I cant see the specs of the machine.. but 1.4GHz and 256Meg ram? thats quicker than normal. I have a 1.4GHz Athlon, which is what I guess it is, and I do lots of playing with recompiling/fixing/recomiling stuff. Normal usage (to me) would mean checking your email, writing letters/stuff with some bloated wordprocessor and maybe playing quake or something :). A machine about half the speed and RAM should do... A 1Ghz AMD Duron should bring the price down a little..
this is not interesting. If they would
run BSD, then it would at least be a real
computer system.
...that the monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc, are meant to be reused from your old 486.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
RED HAT REALLY CHOKES BADLY AUTOPARTITIONING SMALL DISKS. It likes to keep things proportional and make sure there's lots of room in
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I really don't see what the big deal is with slashdotted servers. I've had two of my own articles posted on slashdot, and rode the wave just fine....ON A CABLE MODEM.
:)
Yes, it's true. I hosted a review / editorial site on a Cox@home cable modem for around a year and a half. Never had a problem. It maxed at 30k/sec upstream. Images might have been slow to load, but the entire page always loaded in less than 10 seconds (and rest assured, it had plenty of images, screenshots, and data to load). I think the problem lies less with the amount of visitors going to the site, but with the inefficient page designs with inefficiently placed and uncompressed images.
But then again, maybe I'm just blowing my own horn.
It really choked on an upgrade too -- I had an old 6.0 box that I finally decided to 'upgrade' to 7.2 when it was first announced ...it has a 1.3G /usr partition that had about 800M used ... pretty installer plugs along does an ext3 conversion on my disk and starts copying ... all of a sudden it pops up and tells me I need 400MB more on my /usr partition and dies ... system left unbootable -- seems to be an fschk version problem, tried to use the fschk from the install cd ... didn't help, nothing did.
/home partition is separate and my dbs (mysql stored on /var) were backedup from the night before ... whipped out my debian *diskettes*, did a bare pototoe net install, upgraaded to unstable, built a new kernel all new KDE stuff and magically /usr is only used to the tune of 450Megs ....
Fortunately my
Kind of a shame, all my machines are Debian now, I really wanted to keep one Red Hat box as I work on client sites with Red Hat and it's good to keep one around -- but their installer so wrecked the experience it's unlikely they'll get another chance.
We switched to SuSE at version 4.0 of RH (the one that broke glibc) and have never looked back. That was some 4 or 5 years ago. SuSE is not as pricey as RH - and we *always* buy a new set of disks, books, and registration for our customers - and it is the easiest install IMHO.
I am still installing routinely on 500mb drives and 16mb of RAM using machines thrown out by other clients. These make dandy firewalls and printer servers plus I have one P133 running my mp3 box and doing my file serving.
SuSE rocks... just did an install on a Dell server using ext2 for boot and ext3 for files... dual 18gb ultra scsi, dual P933, hot swap drives and power supplies and 1mb of ram. I think he paid about $2k for it. Gonna replace his ancient NT4 box and no one will ever notice!!! Gotta love it!
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
How do I get to the store for education? Even at $79 (the regular price), it's reasonable, but I couldn't find any mention of a Windows version. Is that only available through the education store?
I noticed, as you did, that the PC requirements are missing from the normal store but present in the regular store. So I called 1-800-MY-APPLE to ask about that, and sat on hold for a while listening to truly shit music. I gave up after a while without getting through, but they ought to be able to answer the question for you.
--saint
Please, when can we get just a little bit of simple code in the bootrom to do that initial installation over the net?
When you get pretty much anything but an x86 architecture machine. I installed OpenBSD on my iMac and on my ancient Sun IPC without any media at all -- just netbooted them from the firmware, picked up the software from my NetBSD box, and took it from there.
It really is pretty surprising that the whole boot ROM / BIOS setup for the Intel architectures hasn't changed a whole lot since I built my first 286.
--saint
why the average user needs a 1.4G Thunderbird. I run an 850 Athlon Classic, 256M RAM, 60G HDD, and a GeForce 2 Ti 64M. This more than handles anything I throw at it, even with the bloated-ass Windows 98 Operating system. I proudly display its performance in the most resource intensive software I can find to all of my gamer friends, and they wonder how I can get an 850 to go so fast...simple...learn how to use the software that runs on it. Once you know how to use it properly, you can probably run just about anything on a 450 or higher and not make it hurt.
Looking at the article, the Normal User Budget System which is low noise + small + affordable price + cool should be the cool SV24 Mini Barebone System! I have one of these and let me tell you, it's better than most ppl's system out there.
VIA C3 933 (new), 512MB SDRAM, GF2 MX (PCI), DVD-RAM, with onboard sound which is acceptable. The whole system is very low noise especially the power supply and the VIA which requires no fan.
The whole barebone is only $250 USD but of course, the DVD-RAM is quite expensive here. I get a good bargain for the GF2MX which performs just well for my gaming like RA2, RTCW, MC2, MW4, and NFS5.
Check out this review now.
I guess this will teach me to host my site on someone elses hardware. The traffic to my site seems to have taken down half the host. Sorry for the inconvience everyone, guess I'll be looking for a new host soon. any suggestions webmaster@linuxwatch.org
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AlmostFreeLinux.com
Hi, I have a suggestion : you could mirror the text of the story in your journal.
On a related note, we need some kind of peer-to-peer mirroring system.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I am a developer and I'm still running on an old Celeron 366 with 192M of RAM. Works fine for me... I don't need anything faster.
We'll Linuxwatch is back online, minus the article everyone wants to read. I'll get on rewritting it ASAP...
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AlmostFreeLinux.com