Linuxwatch Budget System of 2001 267
A reader writes "Linuxwatch.org has posted their Budget System of 2001 in response to LinuxHardware's 2001 System of the year. Boasting their system is 13% of the price and plenty of power for "normal users". Running at 1.4Ghz with 256MB RAM, it doesn't seem to bad for "normal users"(whatever that means)IMHO."
bad soundcard choice. (Score:3, Informative)
Otherwise, couple that machine with a nice 15" Flat panel display and you have a nice Lan-party Box.
Re:Soyo Motherboards (Score:2, Informative)
See The Register for one example of problems with Via Chipsets. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/23502.html
Price Watch has ATI Radeon LE for $59 (Score:2, Informative)
$55 for a radeon? Are they ... nuts?
Last time I checked, you could get a ATI Radeon video card starting at $39 [pricewatch.com].
--"pine in gap" is NOT an innuendo
Re:And they wonder why sales have dropped... (Score:3, Informative)
Many "non-gamers" enjoy Golf games, or flight sim stuff. While these games arne't quake, they can be proc. intensive. A lot of calculations go into figureing out what a golf ball needs to do in order to bahes realistically.
Re:And they wonder why sales have dropped... (Score:5, Informative)
And for compiling software, processor speed makes more of a difference than just about anything else.
Besides, even though this is a budget computer, you don't want the absolute cheapest computer ever, you want something with a reasonable price/performance ratio. Processors slower than this one give you a lot less performance for hardly any savings, while faster than this one give you a little bit more performance for a lot more money.
It IS sold commercially (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It IS sold commercially (Score:2, Informative)
Good soundcard choice. (Score:4, Informative)
The Linux support for the Santa Cruz is nowhere near that of the SBLive.
First, the SBLive will give you hardware mixing in Linux, so there's no need to worry about which apps use which sound daemon. The CS4630 driver doesn't do this.
Second, The sound quality of the SBLive in Linux is much better than in Windows. Chalk that up to the Linux emu10k1 driver guys who have created better DSP patches for the emu10k1 than the guys at Creative.
Finally, there's no evidence that the SBLive's non-compliance has had adverse effects in any OS other than Windows, at least not that I've seen or heard. I've heard many testimonials from people with the SBLive/686B combo who have no problems in Linux.
Your gripes would've been applicable had this been a Windows box, but it isn't.
Office Suites. (Score:3, Informative)
Here's an interesting little secret for Mac OS and Windows users looking for a good office suite. AppleWorks 6 is only _39 dollars_ from the Apple Store for Education. Runs on Windows, Classic Mac OS, and natively on OS X. That's what I'm running on my home and work machines. And the filters for MS Office are top notch.
Come to think of it, you could buy AppleWorks instead of MS Office for your machine now, and use the money you saved on the license to buy this _entire_ budget system. And a monitor. And a NIC. And all the other parts people mention are missing from the currently Slashdotted article.
--saint
Re:It IS sold commercially (Score:3, Informative)
I think you're confusing two systems advertised by Fry's (unless they are advertising something different where you live than they are here).
The 900MHz Celeron is $349 (after rebates) and is from eMachines. It includes Windows XP.
Their $299 "Linux 1.3" machine is a 733MHz Cyrix III chip. It does not come with WIndows XP, though you can buy it as an OEM-priced add-on.
I bought the latter last week (after my server failed to come back up after a power failure). It's a nice small case, fairly quiet, though it does have a fan. I ignored their lame Linux 1.3 system, and swapped in my old disk with RH 7.2. (I had to re-install, because the old kernel was for an Athlon.)
So far it seems like a nice enough system. It is running as bothner.com. I use my laptop for development, so speed has not been a problem. I haven't managed to get the video to show more than 1280x1024, though Xconfigurator claims the builtin AGP card has 8MiB.
Re:MIPS dammit! (Score:3, Informative)
MIPS was a measurement created (I suspect by CMP) back in the 1960s. It was the amount of processing power that a CPU had in terms of IBM 360/50 machine instructions. (Millions of IBM Instructions per Second.) Not cycles of the machine being measured, but normalized against a 360/50's work/clock being "1".
The 360/50 was a classic CISC machine, with the kind of complex addressing modes that only a BAL programmer could love. RISC demonstrated that simple instructions generated by a compiler could often outperform microcode. But that came later: As IBM developed the 360 and 370 lines, work per clock cycle varied. MIPS was normalized.
At DEC, we faced demands for comparison between the VAX and 360 families. (Apples to squash, really, but you know how people want simple comparisons.) In raw CPU capability, an early CISC VAX-11 was not far from a 360/50 in work/cycle. But the measurement we used was the VUPS (VAX unit of processor speed). Again, it was a performance measurement, not a clock timer.