Slashdot Mirror
Building a $200 Linux PC
WesternActor writes "Computers are getting cheaper to buy every year, but there are still sometimes advantages to building them yourself. ExtremeTech has a story about how they sought out the parts for a $200 computer that (of course) runs Linux as a way of breaking the budget barrier. They even test it against a commercially available eMachines nettop to see how it compares in terms of performance. This probably isn't something everyone will want to do, but it's an interesting example of something you can do on the cheap if you put your mind to it."
For the price they paid for CPU+mobo they could have got a mobo with an Atom CPU soldered in. That socket doesn't come for free and, after all, when was the last time you had a CPU upgrade? By the time you want more performance you will most likely get a whole new system.
That's crazy-expensive. We recently bought 6 second-hand little HP desktops for $69 each. They only came with 512MB of RAM, so another $15 each upgraded them to 1GB, and they are perfectly serviceable desktops for our sales and admin team.
The CPU is slower than in the story (single-core Athlon 64 at 1GHz), but performance is just fine.
Linux has always had the extreme flexibility to run on a wide range of processors types not to mention still get a nominal amount of performance and use out of something that is deemed 'obsolete' by Moore's Law. That's why I don't do bleeding edge hardware at home unless I have an absolute need for it (e.g. gaming, or some bloatware application that needs that type of horsepower) and it works great to be a bargain-basement shopper. Do I find this article surprising? Not at all.
With the right hardware Linux is perfect for old hardware. You can customize and tune it quite a bit better than most other OSes. However, the caveat is that the hardware must be decently supported. For example, I have an old laptop with an ATI Mobility 7500 on which I installed Centos 5.5. Normally I'd just grab the FGLRX installer from ATI and remake a module, but in this case, the modules don't work properly. As a result, I'm using a non-accelerated video driver which is painfully slow even for non-intensive graphics such as scrolling a terminal window. I'm not conceding defeat yet. It might be a matter of putting the correct hardware ID into the source and re-compiling or it might be something else entirely. Luckily I know how to do that, but sometimes it's a chore. Not difficult to do, certainly, but a PITA.
On the other hand I have some old single-core AMD Athlons running some virtual machines via Xen and KVM. Even after years of service, they still do a very good job. On a nightly basis they run some software rebuilds in some VMs and in others run DNS, LDAP, fileservers and mail. I have imported the VMs into a newer quad-core system, but until they die, they use less power than the modern machine.
Last winter I put together a 100 euro (~130 dollar) gaming(!) rig.
Took a oc-friendly last-generation graphics card, (~30e), low-end Intel core2 CPU (~25e), random used LGA775 Board (~25e) and 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM (~20e). All 3 off ebay.
I got a IDE-Harddrive, CD-drive and PSU with IDE-style connectors laying around (who uses IDE these days anyway?) and repurposed an old case.
With the graphics card and CPU oc'ed (CPU stable at around twice the stock frequency with boxed cooler) it's a quite veritable rig. Though not every setting can be maxed out, it performs well with any new game.
Well my "mp3" collection is over 400GB - though that includes quite a lot of FLAC and WMA-lossless... just saying... (And that represents over 30,000 tracks)
Since Windows 7 Home Premium retains for $199.99 it obviously has to run Linux otherwise it would be a $400 PC.
I remember reading an article about 15 years ago that said the operating system used to account for 2% of the cost of a PC but by then it was 10% of the cost. It seems that thanks to falling hardware prices and rising prices from Microsoft we've now hit the point where the operating system can be 50% of the cost of the PC.
For purely economical reasons children should use Linux exclusively in schools. As things stand the education system is just generating customers for Microsoft which allows Microsoft to charge whatever they want for the products. I say this as somebody who uses Windows exclusively and who's pissed off at the prices Microsoft charge for their retail software. If I'd grown up using Linux I'd have saved myself a lot of money.
excluding taxes and shipping is pretty ridiculous. they could easily add 1/4 to the budget, and if saving money (not just "ooh, look what i can do") is really a goal, they would have included it.
Well, 200€ actually, but anyway. This is pretty much how I've built the computers for myself and my family for quite some time now:
- 50€ for Case + Power Supply
- 50€ for Motherboard that has Audio, NIC and GPU integrated
- 50€ for CPU
- 50€ for RAM
Some of the pieces could be a little bit less or more than 50€, but in general that's how it goes. And we've always been perfectly happy with the performance of the machines.
I get computers for the school staff for $90 apiece at http://www.techcentercomputers.com/ P4, 512MB, 80GB, XP.
"10 years' worth of digital photos for two people (the other doesn't have a camera) = about 10GB."
Depends on what sort of photos you take. Da spouse has over 100GB of painted bunting photos alone (RAW images mostly).
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I don't see the point of this entire article. Why not just buy a used $200 PC and install Linux on it? Or just keep the Windows and install Linux as a dual-boot (If possible)? There are millions of used $200 PCs available. Nearly all will last another five years at least with normal use.
Motherboard with video and sound integrated - 40$ , CPU - 37$ , case + psu - 30$, memory 20$
We're at 127$ right now, well maybe at 135$ if we include mouse+keyboard
The hard drive is what would push us over the edge, so how about we just replace it with a 8GB memory stick that's 13-15$ ? 2 GB for the OS should be enough (you would install a Linux in much less space if you want to) and you still have 6 GB left for documents and files.
This system is not useful as a desktop if it doesn't include a monitor, keyboard and mouse. The cheapest monitor I see on Newegg is a $99 Hanns-G HW-173ABB 17" LCD monitor, so that would push the price up to $300. The cheapest keyboard and mouse set is about $10. Speakers are about $5. New total is $315 excluding shipping. There's also no mention of whether the integrated sound works in Linux, and whether the integrated video works well (or if Ubuntu resorts to safe graphics mode). I would not be complaining if they had mentioned any of these things in the article.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
foxconn branded boards look good on paper, but they fail in about year. Like everyone keeps saying, just buy a well built Intel Atom based system.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you're going to dumpster dive for a CRT, why not just dumpster dive for the whole computer? :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I just picked up an Acer One netbook from Target for $199 this week. Windows 7 basic (lose some features I could care less about). 10 inch screen LED lit, 1024x600, 1.66 Atom processor, 1g ram, 160g hard drive, and wi-fi.
Why would I want to build anything with prices like that? Best of all, its very portable, has lasted almost eight hours on a charge, and the keyboard is good too.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
2.5Ghz quad, 800GB(64MB cache), 2GB DDR3-1333, HDMI out, crappy case.
$75.99 AMD Phenom 9850 2.5GHz Socket AM2+ 125W Quad-Core Black Edition Processor HD985ZXAJ4BGH
$59.99 Western Digital Caviar Green WD8000AARS 800GB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
$69.99 MSI 760GM-E51 AM3 AMD 760G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
$47.99 Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model CT2KIT12864BA1339
$39.99 Foxconn TLM776-CN300C-01 Black/ Silver Steel MicroATX Mini Tower Computer Case 300W Power Supply
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$283.95
shipping it works out to about $300, more if you have to pay tax.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Updates wont break the "crack".
While you can sure safe money on a diy-box there are far better reasons for that approach.
Most pre-assembled boxes fail on a quite a couple of choices.
Case:
Unless you are getting some overpriced gamer boxes the case is crap! Hassle to upgrade, cheap materials, lots of edges you can cut yourself etc...
I will be keeping my nice Chieftec tower for the next couple of iterations. Exchanging drives is a lot faster, everything is easy to to get too, nice cool and quiet (with the extra ventilation).
Power Unit:
One of the mayor sources of annoyance. Choosing an efficient and quiet one sure is relaxing.
Mainboard:
Mainboards happen to be the number one source of failure in PCs. Even rather expensive boxes usually have cheap boards since they cant advertise them (more ghz? No. More cores? No. More memory? No. More reliable capacitors? Ever see something like that in a description?)
The mobo is the component i never safe money on. Its supposed to handle the next cpu as well and i rather keep a good mobo than getting the next asrock or similiar.
Do i safe money compared to a similarly specced box from a retailer? No.
But i know its more reliable and easy to upgrade, so i do safe money in the long run due to upgrading and have less hassle replacing sub-par components.
Computer manufacturers or parts manufacturers will never push the idea of custom built computers to the uninformed masses. There's much more money involved in pre-built systems, even more when you stick an atom in a net-top instead of a much more capable c2d. Computer manufacturers make more money from markup, and parts manufacturers can streamline the production process straight to the manufacturer, possibly even at a premium.