On Monday 18 April 2005 22:26, Jason Clinton wrote:
On Monday 18 April 2005 21:34, Robert Kennedy wrote:
So here's what I want input on. Are there any brands for the hardware that I should tell my nephew NOT to consider? What are your practical opinions on the distro?
Well, I've been a scrounger for most of my system, I'm running an old AMD K6-2 @500 MHz/ASUS socket 7 mobo. Started with 64 megs of memory; when I went to 128 it helped appreciably. More memory, the better --- and it helps cut down on the swap space useage.
I have an AGP video card with only 8 megs memory, which is pretty good for most of my stuff. Now if I want to do some very heavy graphics, then I'd go for the bigger fancier video cards. I just won't pay more for the video card than I paid for the mobo/processor, if you know what I mean!!!
SCSI is better than IDE but you pay for it. I use Adaptec AHA2940 cards, as they seem to be a standard in Linux. The caveat is adapting from one series of connectors to another (the adapters are EXPENSIVE). IDE now has the price advantage, but you're limited to 2 devices per IDE channel, and usually only two channels on the mobo. With wide SCSI you can have up to 15 devices, and that also includes SCSI scanners, CD-ROM drives, tape streamers, and my peccadillo -- the old Syquest removable media drives.
I do aagree that AMD gives more bang for the buck than Intel.
My fav distro so far has been SuSE, as I once had very little problems doing installs on the 6.4 and 7.2 versions. 9.1 was another story, although I finally got things figured out earlier today. I found out from their help desk that since I bought my disks a year ago, the support window has expired, and I would have to BUY time with Novell for support. Not very happy with that at all. That's the caveat emptor about them.
One hard rule I live by is: Don't upgrade unless you need the features it will give you. Each of the older distros had features I wish was still on the newest. But you know how they LOVE to CHANGE THINGS.
Aa with all things computer, your mileage may vary.
Gary Hildebrand St. Joseph, MO