Subject: Re: new computer recommendations
From: civileme (civileme@mandrakesoft.com)
Date: Fri Jul 05 2002 - 10:53:29 AKDT
On Thursday 04 July 2002 01:20 pm, Justin Dieters wrote:
> I'm looking at building a new computer. Looking at something pretty
> good, but not _too_ expensive. Athlon 2100+, 512 RAM, decent 3d vid
> card, 24X or higher cd/rw, 40gb+ hard drive.
>
> I'm hoping that someone has recommendations for what hardware works the
> best with linux. Particularly the video card, sound card, and
> motherboard (usb in particular)
>
> Also, I've heard of some problems with combinations of athlon, agp, and
> linux. Does anyone know what the problem is, and how I can avoid it?
>
> Any other general recommendations on what hardware to get would be good
> too. :)
>
> Thanks,
> Justin
>
> P.S. if anyone is interested in a nice laptop, i'm planning on selling
> mine to help pay for this new desktop :)
>
>
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OK I just finished a test sequence with the A7N266-VM from ASUS
I have also tried the SiS chipsets lately.
ALSA pukes on the SiS sound but OSS works flawlessly.
The A7N266-VM required tweaking to get the network up; tweaking of the
serious kind where you create ifcfg-eth0 yourself and put it into
/etc/sysconfig/networking and /etc/modules.conf. None of the current kernels
happened to have the nvnet driver at release time. It IS open-source so it
will likely be in the next round of releases. Sound was a slightly hacked
i810 audio driver. Drivers linked to the Mandrake and RH kernels are
available as binary rpms from NVidia, but even with the driver available, the
nvnet still doesn't autodetect into network scripts.
Mainboards based on the VIA KT266A and on the ALi Magic chipsets are quite
simply to be avoided for several months and to be bought never from surplus
suppliers. Both the chipsets have broken clocks and the spurious clock
pulses play nasty with DMA transfers. The result is corrupted filesystems,
confirmed for JFS, Reiserfs, XFS, and ext3 (and ext2 over linux software
RAID). If you limit yourself to ext2.... Well my exerciser programs haven't
broken it yet on those boards, but no guarantees.
I have never seen a round of chipset/circuitboard efforts as buggy as this,
ever before, (well , at least not since early Ohio Scientific Dynamic memory
cards, or the PCChips fake memory cache boards). The main processor affected
is the Athlon and everything but the NForce and the SiS 73x series seems to
have serious problems.
Civileme
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