Does anyone have any Linux 6.0 install horror stories, CPU or motherboard?

[Devin Carraway]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2000 at 11:59:40PM -0800, David Cole wrote:
>     Are there any CPU or motherboard brand's to AVOID when installing Linux
> 6.0?

	Haven't hardly found a board or CPU that Linux didn't like.  In
general your best route is to buy commodity hardware (the stuff you can find
at your local computer shop) as close to the standards as possible.  Try to
avoid boards with onboard sound or video (since they're almost never worth
it, no matter what your OS).

	For a while Cyrix chips had a hard time, under Linux as much as any
other OS.  Reportedly that did get better, though.  Try to avoid boards with
chipsets from VIA, though that too is reportedly improving with recent
kernels.

	Do not, whatever the temptation, buy a machine from an OEM vendor
(HP, Dell, etc) unless it says Linux on the box.  The bigger OEMs tend to
make a lot of liberties with trimming costs off their systems at the expense
of reliability and compatibility.  Whatever the rebate on that HP Pavillion,
skip it.

>     Does anyone have any Linux 6.0 install horror stories, CPU or
> motherboard?

	Cyrix 486DLC-40.  Not likely you'll have that problem.

>     Do you have any that you personally LOVED or hated?

	Generally speaking, I've never had trouble with standards-complying,
commodity hardware.  Boards from the major manufacturers (I've favored Asus
for the last while), CPUs from AMD or Intel.

> Celeron, Pentium, OverDrive, Pentium Pro®, Pentium II, AMD K6-2, AMD K6, AMD
> Athlon

	I've run Linux on every one of those except Intel's "overdrive"
chips with no complaints.

>     I am setting up a couple more inexpensive Linux WebServer boxes, and
>     I'm looking for purchasing advice on Non-Alpha, Non-MAC CPUs or
> motherboard's.

	Building from parts is probably your cheapest option.  Buying short
of the bleeding edge and above the cheapest-model is generally a good
practice for sake of stability, when you're building servers.  If you can
find them, pentium pros make wonderful servers (big fat cache, improved
memory bus) and are available for good prices.

	If you don't feel up to flipping the hardware around yourself, there
are lots of vendors making machines intended for Linux; Penguin Computing in
SF and VA come to mind -- Cobalt's Linux servers are very sexy and reliable
if you like blue and don't mind spending a little.

>     I will be serving into a 100 based LAN with a tulip Nic card, that feeds
> into a T1 line that serves a college.
>     And are there any 100based Nic cards that beat NetGear310 for price and
> performance?

	Tulips are well regarded in that respect.  DEC made about a million
of the things, hardly any of which actually say "Tulip" on the box.  Most
PCI-based ether cards above the NE2000-level tend not to lean much on the
CPU.  Most of my server-building experience has been with Intel
etherexpress pro-100 and 3com cards, with both of which I've been pleased.

	Keep in mind that 100mbit will make very little difference in the
performance of a webserver -- you'll generally run up against software
bottlenecks before you can tap out the bandwidth of your network -- and if
you're serving over a T1, it makes little difference whether you're even
running at 100 or 10 -- you can pretty much saturate a T1 networking over
the parallel port if it takes your fancy.


-- 
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