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The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal builds the
ultimate Linux box starting with the ultimate AMD64 motherboard.
"One very important consideration in our choices was, will this work
with most Linux distributions "out of the box"? We installed Debian,
Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora Core 5, SUSE 10 and Mandriva on our do-it-yourself
system. All of these distributions ran without any trouble and without the
need for any additional drivers or special driver management. (We did,
however, use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, not out of necessity, but in
order to make use of the SLI features of the motherboards.) We also ran
Knoppix, MEPIS and Kanotix live CDs without problems."
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The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 3, 2006 16:42 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] The "Ultimate" part is clearly dominating, while Linux compatibility is an afterthought. Not only is the choice of the video card Linux-unfriendly, but also paying extra $90 for a SATA optical drive gives nothing under Linux. At this price level, one has to ask what this system is supposed to do. For a desktop machine, you want a video card that works without proprietary modules, and you probably don't want two hard drives. For a server, an integrated video card would be fine, and a fancy case would be useless.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 3, 2006 17:04 UTC (Mon) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link] "For a desktop machine, you want a video card that works without proprietary modules"Actually, for a desktop machine, most people want a recent/decent graphics card that works and works well. Nvidia's a perfectly good choice. Their drivers work just fine. The politics of owning a card might not match the OSS thing, but please remember that that is just politics, and nothing to do with the actual hardware, or even the ability to get it to work.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 3, 2006 18:42 UTC (Mon) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] What video card with GPL drivers is available?
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 3, 2006 20:30 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I like the onboard intel.
If you have modest demands on 3d performance the GMA 950 and GMA 900 are fine video cards from the Intel 945g and 915g (respectively and related chipsets).
These are the successors to the horrible 'Extreme Blaster 2' series of video cards. 300-400mhz cores sharing main memory over the PCIe bus.. they have great Linux compatability and are able to perform well enough for applications like Blender and are comfortable at driving 'Return to Castle Wolfenstien' level games... Which means most free software games will work fine. As should AIGLX/XGLX X servers with compiz and such.
These cards have the highest comaptability and feature set of any cards with the DRI drivers.
Should work out of the box with any distro using the X.org 7.1 X server. For my system I use Debian unstable with CVS dri drivers. I find that if you set the variable 'Intel_Batch=1' before running games it will double performance, although you loose compatability with X resize stuff. This may change though as the drivers progress.
The upsides:
The downsides:
If you need more performance then ATI video cards have open source DRI drivers.
Linux supports ATI cards from r200 series.. Of which the ATI 8500 is the best performer (out performing later 9200/9250 cards).
The newer r300_dri drivers have good compatability and support cards up to the x800 series video card. (that's r420/r480...) Although you will have to use CVS drivers for the latest stuff.
ATI cards from the x1000 series and newer are unsupported and you will not even get 2d acceleration from Free drivers.
See here for compatability/tests reports with the r300_dri drivers..
That's with the latest CVS stuff.
I had a x800 video card that I became quite happy with until the heatsink crapped out. They are not quite as stable as the Intel stuff, but they offer very good performance.
I recommend sticking with Intel motherboards.. They have good Linxu compatability. Open docs on SATA stuff. Good support for the gigabit ethernet if your running a newer kernel.
Pretty much everything.. Ethernet, SATA, Wifi, and even full 3d and 2d acceleration works with Free software drivers in a fairly painless manner.
If you need higher performance then ATI r300 or r400 series video cards would be the next choice.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 5, 2006 13:06 UTC (Wed) by Wills (guest, #1813) [Link] "Pretty much everything.. Ethernet, SATA, Wifi, and even full 3d and 2d acceleration works with Free software drivers in a fairly painless manner."Pretty much everything except SATA-II... Is there any motherboard with SATA-II support in Linux? I can't seem to find one that works.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 5, 2006 15:47 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] Nothing named SATA-II exists as a SATA standard.
Do you mean Linux support for NCQ? It's in progress, but controllers and drives should still work in Linux without using NCQ.
Support for 3 Gb/s connection speeds is transparent and should just work.
There are also some features like link power, external SATA, multiple drives per cable, and staggered spin up that have been called SATA-II. I am not sure about Linux support for any of these.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 5, 2006 16:55 UTC (Wed) by Wills (guest, #1813) [Link] Thanks for the clarification. However, there seems to be widespread confusion about the SATA terminology even among the motherboard manufacturers and PC vendors. "Serial ATA/150" and "Serial ATA/300" are used synonymously with "SATA-I" (or "SATA1") and "SATA-II" (or "SATA2") in product specifications by PC vendors and motherboard manufacturers to mean up to 150MB/s transfer speed and up to 300MB/s transfer speed, respectively. For example, MSI's RS482M4-ILD motherboard specs mention "Serial ATA/150" with a transfer speed of up to 150MB/s which they call "SATA", MSI's K9N Diamond motherboard specs mention "Serial ATA/300" with a transfer speed of up to 300MB/s which they call both "SATA2" and "SATA-II". It seems motherboards with only "SATA" or "SATA1" support do not have transfer speeds above 150MB/s. I am looking for an AMD64/nVidia motherboard with at least the 300MB/s aspect of so-called "SATA2" fully supported in Linux. It would be nice if the motherboard also had the other SATA features you mentioned also fully supported in Linux.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 4, 2006 5:07 UTC (Tue) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] Radeon 9250's are pretty nice. Cheap, and cool enough to not require their own fan.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 4, 2006 9:12 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] ... and with very good support from X.org.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 3, 2006 19:37 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Just politics, eh? Like free speech is just politics, or free association? Or not having your house taken away by eminent domain? But okay, as long as I can play the neat games it doesn't matter how many people get screwed...I'm enjoying my bread and circuses, don't bother me with all those "politics".
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 27, 2006 0:16 UTC (Thu) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link] Free speech? Nobody's being silenced here, what you're talking about is *forced* speech, demanding nvidia release information they don't wish to.
They have released drivers that work just fine, but not in a way that matches your idealogy. They're free, they work just fine, and there's no sign of that changing, so your problem is just politics, not anything functional.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 3, 2006 22:27 UTC (Mon) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Actually, for a desktop machine, most people want a recent/decent graphics card that works and works well.How are you determining what "most people" want? Most people I know don't like binary drivers, which directly affects the choice of a graphics card, but I suspect we might be talking about two distinct groups of "most people."
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 4, 2006 9:08 UTC (Tue) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link] Most people I know (that run linux) don't like the binary-only drivers either. However, they do like having a decent graphics card for games, and end up running the binary-only drivers anyway. The only place where I see many machines running open source video drivers is work, where half of the machines has an onboard intel chipset (and are not used for any intensive 3D stuff).So, as far as I can tell most people I know that run linux would prefer having open source drivers, but are not willing to actually switch to another type of video card for it unless it comes with the motherboard anyway and the machine is not used for gaming. I myself will definitely consider getting a graphics card with open source drivers at my next purchase, as I find that my somewhat older nvidia card (5700?) is still more than capable for all the linux 3D programs I run (fgfs, some games, google earth) and I expect ATI's cards with open drivers will achieve similar performance.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 4, 2006 18:05 UTC (Tue) by dcoutts (guest, #5387) [Link] I like having decent graphics and used to run games like ET. I've always bought the fastest card with open source 3D drivers. So I've been through a series of radeon cards, from a 7200 to a 9250 and then another 9250 (the new one has no fan and has dual VGA out).
I just bought a laptop and called up the Dell sales to ask which models come with graphics cards and wifi that have open source drivers. As others have mentioned that meant a chipset-integrated intel 950 rather than an faster ATI or similar.
For the "Just Works"tm factor I've always felt that it's worth getting hardware with open drivers. I hear so many horror stories about binary-only divers (eg with nvidia or ati divers and xorg-7.1). Similarly, I wouldn't touch ndiswrapper with a barge pole.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 27, 2006 0:08 UTC (Thu) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link] If most people cared enough to only use open source drivers, then Windows wouldn't be as ubiquitous as it is.
Linux geeks are definitely not the majority of the computer using population, sorry.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 3, 2006 17:06 UTC (Mon) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link] If you don't have any qualms about using the nvidia driver, which most people of the type this box is geared towards don't, then there's really no problem. This is a gaming machine first and foremost, and when it comes down to it there's only two choices for the video, and only one supports dual GPUs under Linux. What you're going to do with dual GPUs in Linux is anyone's guess of course, but luckily things don't have to actually make sense to the Pimp My Boxen crowd.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 4, 2006 3:57 UTC (Tue) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link] This box is very similar to my current box (which surprises me -- I wasn't aiming for "ultimate" when I built it). The only OS I run on mine is a GNU/Linux distro. I deliberately chose an nVidia card after comparing my options for good 3D accelerated graphics -- the other options are worse.
The only "bad" thing is that for good 3D, I have to use nVidia's binary-only drivers. I decided I could live with this, since I can have basic computing functionality with the nv or vesa drivers.
So I don't understand your "afterthought" comment. It seems more like you are interested in polemics, than in honestly assesing the decisions made by the Linux Journal.
Side note: don't get me started on Intel chipsets -- they are poor performers, *and* have a lousy history with Linux kernels. They have a lousy history with Windows, too. ATI used to be good with Linux, and was all I ran for many, many years -- but that has changed. nVidia has been binary with Linux forever, which is both a plus (forever) and minus(binary). At this point, I think nVidia has the best track record.
-Paul
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 5, 2006 0:14 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] "Afterthought" means to choose the hardware first and to check compatibility later. If it doesn't work well or doesn't offer any advantage under Linux, it's OK as long as it works at all.
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 13, 2006 13:07 UTC (Thu) by wjl (guest, #26714) [Link] > At this price level, one has to ask what this system is supposed to do.
This is *exactly* what I was thinking. Their boxen seem to be meant to be "everything for everyone", but can that be called "ultimate" still?
For me, power consumption is a topic. Plus I'm no gamer and would never even think about SLI and such. "Ultimate" for me would mean cool & quiet & energy efficient, and still with enough muscles.
Which brings me to the point: how much is "enough"? For web surfing, reading and replying to emails, IRC, and a bit development, my XP1700+ is fine. It's not energy efficient by any means: a running but idle Gnome desktop lets it draw 115-120 Watts, not even counting the TFT. But replacing it with other stuff wouldn't be efficient as well (keep in mind that it would be recycled or used by someone else somewhere else, so all in all this would result in just another machine running).
If you search my blog for the "ultimate" thing, you can find more of these thoughts, including some alternatives which are really cheaper than the ones recommended by LJ.
Still: that was the best of what Mr. Peterey wrote there so far...
cheers,
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