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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."
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.
However, the Soyo (and your ASUS) board use the Via southbridge POS. After upgrading my system to a SiS based performing I realized how poor my Soyo and Abit systems where performing. the DMA and PCI implementation on the VIA chipsets is just bad.
See The Register for one example of problems with Via Chipsets. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/23502.html
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
$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?
I would toss games into the average user catagory these days.
Many "non-gamers" enjoy Golf games, or flight sim stuff. While these games arne't quake, they can be proc. intensive. A lot of calculations go into figureing out what a golf ball needs to do in order to bahes realistically.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Keep in mind that the average Linux user - even if he/she isn't a programmer - spends a fair amount of time compiling software.
And for compiling software, processor speed makes more of a difference than just about anything else.
Besides, even though this is a budget computer, you don't want the absolute cheapest computer ever, you want something with a reasonable price/performance ratio. Processors slower than this one give you a lot less performance for hardly any savings, while faster than this one give you a little bit more performance for a lot more money.
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.
(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
MIPS was a measurement created (I suspect by CMP) back in the 1960s. It was the amount of processing power that a CPU had in terms of IBM 360/50 machine instructions. (Millions of IBM Instructions per Second.) Not cycles of the machine being measured, but normalized against a 360/50's work/clock being "1".
The 360/50 was a classic CISC machine, with the kind of complex addressing modes that only a BAL programmer could love. RISC demonstrated that simple instructions generated by a compiler could often outperform microcode. But that came later: As IBM developed the 360 and 370 lines, work per clock cycle varied. MIPS was normalized.
At DEC, we faced demands for comparison between the VAX and 360 families. (Apples to squash, really, but you know how people want simple comparisons.) In raw CPU capability, an early CISC VAX-11 was not far from a 360/50 in work/cycle. But the measurement we used was the VUPS (VAX unit of processor speed). Again, it was a performance measurement, not a clock timer.