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AMD MP Athlon FreeBSD certified

Posted by michael on from the not-dying dept.

RazzleDazzle writes: "AMD released a MP Athlon system that has been certified by Daemon News to work with FreeBSD. Read the full article here."

22 comments

  1. "Certified"... by a news website? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What does it mean to be "certified" by daemonnews.org? Is that supposed to hold any water? Will Slashdot be selling "certified" Linux boxes anytime soon?

    1. Re:"Certified"... by a news website? by NWT · · Score: 1

      Sure. They test it, and tell you wheter it works or not. It's good to know these facts when you plan to buy a computer to work with a specific os. I mean, ok they're a news site and i don't think that AMD will post this to their site, but it's good to know that it works anyway!

      --
      Life sucks.
    2. Re:"Certified"... by a news website? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, it is misleading to say it's "FreeBSD Certified." If a mailman runs Linux on his home computer and likes it, that doesn't make it "Endorsed by the U.S. Government." Neither does a news site's approval of the hardware amount to it being "FreeBSD certified".

    3. Re:"Certified"... by a news website? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Truthfully it means that AMD loaned a computer to Chris Coleman to play with. He ran
      seti@home on it for a couple weeks. Really. That's how it was certified, I kid you not.

      Running seti@home tells you more about Chris Coleman than it does about the computer ;^)

    4. Re:"Certified"... by a news website? by NWT · · Score: 1

      I agree. The story title was indeed misleading. "AMD MP Athlon: Daemonnews certified" would have been a better choice. The article itself is ok, it says "AMD Dual Processor Certified for FreeBSD " and the certified-logo clearly shows the daemnonews name ...

      Well anyway, shit happens, and we all make mistakes ;)

      --
      Life sucks.
    5. Re:"Certified"... by a news website? by jaberwaki · · Score: 1

      When you are an admin trying to convince your boss to not waste his money on a micro$oft license and instead use freebsd or linux the more proof that you can show that it will work the better.

      I agree that a website certification shouldn't be given much weight but I've seen managers make decisions based on much less.

  2. SMP by NWT · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Finally FreeBSD works fine with multiprocessor systems, the autor had no problems with his 2 Athlon MPs, that's really great. Finally, you can have a really powerful smp - FreeBSD server system for not too much money! The installation was completed with only one cpu, but a new kernel with the options SMP and APIC_IO enable both cpus.

    --
    Life sucks.
  3. AMD Does it's bit... by gus+goose · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... for Seti@Home.

    Good to see that 3 months of use and 8 Seti Units a day gives hardware a certificate .... ;-)

    In all fairness, that was a stressful test (CPU Wise), but the report could have been a little more fleshy given a 3 month review period.

    I will certify hardware if I can up my SETI Stats at the same time.... ;-)

    gus

    --
    Certified to compute fourier transforms....

    --
    .. if only.
    1. Re:AMD Does it's bit... by Jekyll · · Score: 1

      yeah, no joke. I was wanting at least one pretty graph. Maybe kernel or world compile times between some machines, then one processor, then two.. I mean, seriously.. what the hell? I honestly think this poor guy had no idea what he had coming. Like.. "wtf? someone actually sent me something?". I guess FreeBSD cert program is good (?), but maybe some sort of criteria in testing the systems would be better.

  4. Slashdot "certified" Linux boxes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sounds like "VA-Whatever-It-Happens-To-Be-Today" to me. How well did they do?

  5. So, let me get this straight. by watchmaker1 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Daemon News gets AMD to pony up a dual Athlon MP 1500+ system in exchange for "certification" and a review.

    Daemon News is a dual headed site, "publishing" a once monthy web based "zine" full of largely irrelevant BSD "stories". They also have the daily section which is a low volume slashdot clone centered on BSD news running an inferior Slash clone based in PHP.

    Though, being an OpenBSD user, I check the site regularly for snippets of news not picked up elsewhere, it has always felt like a site some guy runs in his basement. So, I was surprised that AMD would send them hardware.

    And how much better off are we for AMD's gift? Are there any shocking revelations? Well, no. FreeBSD works in SMP mode, though the install kernel doesn't recognize the second CPU. Shocking. I've run FreeBSD as an MP3 fileserver/streamer in my basement for months on an old Dual Celeron 366 Abit BP6 I had laying around.

    And what does the author tell us about performance? Why, two incredibly useful tidbits.

    A) A dual Athlon 1500+ is much faster at running KDE than a Pentium 133 with 64 megs of ram.
    B) A dual Athlon 1500+ is much faster at running Seti@home than a Pentium II 300.

    So, here's a shout out to all the hardware companies on the planet. If you contact me and send me free shit, I'll happily certify that it works, keep it, and write an obtuse, irrelevant and worthless "review" on how your system is faster than the Toshiba 386 laptop I currently do my Non Linear video editing and POVRAY on.

    1. Re:So, let me get this straight. by Arandir · · Score: 2

      Daemonnews does more than just manage two websites. They also print a deadtree version of the magazine, sell software, books, and misc. stuff, hold BSD related courses, and sell support.

      --
      A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
    2. Re:So, let me get this straight. by Omega996 · · Score: 1

      well, actually one good point (not even a minor one). at least i can see that 4.4-RELEASE builds on AMD - there have been some issues with AMD processors and building FreeBSD kernels in the fairly recent past (at least for me).

  6. I will give everybody certificates. by Corpset · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That is, if they send me free hardware. I don't mean to sound mean, but isn't it something fishy about that "review"?

    Hell, if I could get something for free that thing alone would be a bonus in my review. Free stuff is good stuff. Even if it's bad, it's still good just because it was free. And now it's certified.

    --
    rxvt, suse, vi, solaris, debian, java, c, feel the love. #unix@IRCnet, #gimp & #gnome@GIMPnet
  7. Re:DaemonNews? by TurboRoot · · Score: 1

    When ever you posted that, it was at the bottom of the list of comments. And further down then that is the little box that has a random quote/statement.. and funny enough... when i was reading your post it said..

    "Make a wish, it might come true. "

  8. Now cut that out! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're making me hungry for FUDge (again).

  9. FACT: slashdot subscriptions are overpriced. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So is Linux.