Re: [tlug] hardware

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On Monday 19 May 2003 18:10, Peter Evans wrote:

> Any names to look out for when selecting components for Joe Schmoe's
> little workstation?

Stuff to avoid:

- Any NIC with a Realtek chip (has a little crab logo on it; most budget
cards these days use them, so look for one that doesn't).  Via Rhine is
not bad, and SiS seems to work OK (although their video chipsets usually
suck, so make your own call on that);

- No-name parts unless they specifically say they work with Linux (video
cards excepted);

- The latest and greatest video cards are often poorly supported by X, or
not supported yet.  If in doubt, go shopping with the XFree86 supported list
in hand, or buy somewhere behind the state of the art.  That will also save
you some money;

- Motherboards from makers you've never heard of, just in case;

Stuff that is good:

- Asus, MSI, and GigaByte motherboards are all excellent.  If you want to
find out about performance, check tomshardware.com.  All should be reliable
and compatible.  I like MSI and GigaByte a lot.  Note that if you buy one with
a Promise 20276 chip, you need an installer with a 2.4.20 kernel for out of
the box RAID support (you can download a Debian Woody installer with 2.4.20;
google for it);

- If you don't care about 3-D (that is, non-gamer), Matrox is the only word you
need to know in video cards.  Their 3-D accel was pretty well eclipsed by
nVidia et al, but their 2-D is still the clearest and sharpest in the business.  I
love my G450 and have no plans to move to anything else (maybe someday
a newer Matrox board :-) ;

- Intel EEPro100 and 3Com 3c905 NICs are worth the money;

- Adaptec SCSI is good, if you need SCSI;

- Stick to name brand parts when in doubt.

- Matsushita, Teac, and Plextor CD/R/RW drives have all
been excellent, in my experience.  Plextor isn't cheap, but
it's good.  The others are also pretty good and much cheaper.
I have an old 8X write Matsushita CD-R SCSI drive that I refuse
to part with until it dies, and no sign of that so far.

> hardware issues in installing Gentoo:
> > I encountered a number of problems that were the fault of my
> > hardware and motherboard BIOS. . . . I had enough problems with
> > the Biostar motherboard

OK, don't buy a Biostar :-)

WRT the nvidia drivers, they've been famous for a long time for
causing problems.  If Chris Sekiya were still on TLUG, he'd be quite
happy to rant about them, I'm sure :-)  Chris is (was?) an XFree86
maintainer, so his rants about that tend to be quite detailed and expert.
Stick with a stable release of X and the drivers that come with and you
should be OK.  Unsupported cards are not terribly common these days.

Because Gentoo stands somewhere between Debian Unstable and
Linux--from-Scratch, you have to be a lot more "into" the install
then you would with any of the main "easy" distros such as RH, 
SuSE, or Mandrake, and probably more than with Debian, the
predominant "hard" distro.  If you use something like Red Hat and
mainstream hardware, it should be a case of "just pour it in and it
works."  If  you use Debian Woody (stable), it's pretty much the same
way, but you do need to know more about your system and about Linux
than if you were installing Red Hat.

> I can easily imagine that I don't need to bug anybody here, and that I'd
> be better off talking to somebody in a shop. 

Not many people at not many shops know much about Linux.  People
at Plathome (http://www.plathome.co.jp/> should, but on the other hand,
Plathome is quite expensive.  Building a decent box that works right
with Linux the first time isn't hard.  Just avoid buying crap, or at least
buy crap that you know works :-)

HTH,

Jonathan Q
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