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Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management)
There are many ways to set up the ideal desktop. In this
article Bruce Byfield shares some thoughts on the subject.
"After years of authorized and -- I admit -- the occasional
unauthorized but non-tampering snooping, I'm overdue to offer
reciprocity. I'm not naive enough to throw open my machine for everyone to
examine online, but, over the years, I have developed several pages of
hard-earned notes that I follow and revise whenever I buy and set up a new
computer."
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Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 7:57 UTC (Wed) by BackSeat (subscriber, #1886) [Link] The premise of the article - that there is a specific way to set up the ideal Linux desktop - is false to start with, but this article doesn't even discuss how to set up an ideal desktop. Instead it is little more than a list of applications that the author installs. Such articles are merely refinements of the Gnome versus KDE or vim versus emacs arguments.In other words, a content-free article.
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 12:00 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Quite so. I'm thinking of replacing every machine I own (the newest is nine years old and is quite slow by modern standards; I've not bought a machine for all that time so am quite out of touch), but there's no easy way to figure out what on earth to get. ESR's _Building the Perfect Box_ was damn useful back in the day, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent now.
It's not a matter of 'what hardware does Linux support' because outside of graphics cards the answer is 'everything' these days. The question is more 'what is best'. (One example I'm clueless about, out of many: I'm not sure whether SATA or SCSI are best for 5-way RAID-6; probably SATA unless you're made of money, but can you even attach five drives to non-horrendously-expensive systems? Then there are hidden weirdnesses like finding a motherboard which won't SMI and ACPI me to distraction and generally introduce horrible instability...)
I'll probably resort to making an idiot of myself on Usenet asking stupid questions on Linux newsgroups. Virtually everyone on Earth knows more about modern hardware than me, after all.
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 14:33 UTC (Wed) by etienne_lorrain@yahoo.fr (guest, #38022) [Link]
+1
I bought few years ago a (blank) portable PC with an all Intel chipset, and all the hardware is supported by Linux... The ACPI (i.e. the "new" BIOS) do not support Linux, so that it is not only impossible to suspend - but even the hard disk seems to (sometimes, when unused) enter a low power mode and is unable to recover. Changed the HD few days ago with another brand, not fixed. Portable PC without any brand, no BIOS updates possible. I can now see why the ACPI was so important to implement and use widely, at least for some companies...
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 16:04 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I replaced all my hard drives with SSDs. The greatest thing is that there is no need to worry about fragmentation. My main partition is 79% full, and I don't care. I don't hoard videos, so 30 Gb is enough for all my machines. The only problem is that 2.5 drives cannot be mounted easily in some desktops. I ordered mounting brackets; in the meantime, some drives are mounted with a single screw.Firefox starts much faster. Searches in Linux sources take significantly less time. Compilation is faster too, especially with "make -j4".
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 20:13 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I don't worry about fragmentation anyway. Modern fses are resistant enough
that it only gets noticeable if your fs is 95+% full and heavily written to over a long period of time.
I'd only be willing to replace my HDDs with SSDs if the price of SSDs
Compilation, well, that should be CPU-bound anyway. If it isn't something
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 21:12 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I believe accessing many files at once is better. Using "make -jN" with N much more than the number of CPUs used to be very disk intensive. Now there is little difference between "make -j2" and "make -j9" on a dual core system. What's more important is that I can run several builds with "make -j2" without worrying that they will slow down each other.You can use 2 drives with RAID1 until the prices fall enough to make you comfortable with buying more drives.
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 18:27 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] It's not a matter of 'what hardware does Linux support' because outside of graphics cards the answer is 'everything' these days.Well, I haven't tried the latest and greatest, but apart from the graphics card, Linux had problems with my webcam, TV card and sound card (the last two are regressions, they used to work fine).
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 19:58 UTC (Wed) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] but can you even attach five [SATA] drives to non-horrendously-expensive systems? Yes. SATA expansion cards are fairly cheap. Most of them have some sort of RAIDish chip, too, but you can ignore/disable that and just use the disks directly. (If you can't, send it back.)
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 20:58 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Obviously RAID in this case means 'md'. Given a choice between proprietary
one-controller RAID and a system implemented in free software that doesn't care what sorts of block devices are attached and is maintained by a wizard as pleasant as Neil Brown I know what I prefer :))
(and yes, the maintainer's personality really *does* count.)
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 20:14 UTC (Wed) by palapa (subscriber, #612) [Link]
Not raid 5:
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 21:04 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That badly-thought-out article is right only if it assumes that you never
check your RAID-6 array for consistency and that the drive never retries on read errors (so that all transient read errors during a RAID reconstruction are fatal). Both of these assumptions are wrong in my case, and in the case of pretty much anyone using md from their distro (all of which do checks every so often).
Even RAID-5 has some life in it yet, iff you assume that drives retry on
In the end, if you have enough simultaneous disk failures, you're dead:
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 21:12 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
it's easy enough to setup a system like you are describing, how cheap and hot high it's performance is depends heavily on what you end up buying
you ask the question about SCSI vs SATA for a 5-way raid 6 array
I think you are putting the cart befor the horse.
why do you want a 5-way raid 6 array?
is it for high capacity? if so, how much space do you need? a 5-way raid 6 array of SATA drives is ~3TB of useable space (assuming that you are avoiding the 1.5TB drives for now, if you aren't it would be 4.5TB) to get 3TB of usable space from SCSI drives will require a 9-12-way raid 6 array
the SCSI array will be faster, but it will be _MUCH_ more expensive (you need a larger case and power supply to power 12 drives, each of the 12 drives costs about three times the cost of the SATA drives (going to the 450G SAS drives is about the same overall cost)
the answer to 'what is best' is usually going to be pretty expensive if you only look at performance. everything is a cost performance trade-off, and at both extremes the support for linux can get ragged (on the low end becouse the vendor cuts corners, and on the high end becouse so few devices exist that linux may not have bumped into one of them yet)
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 21, 2009 23:28 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That's why I was expecting to go for SATA. My current setup is SCSI and it
was *not* cheap: the sole advantages of it from my perspective being vibration-resistance and limited-time retries, both of which I'm willing to sacrifice for a nice big price drop since neither impact reliability.
I suspect I'll need PCI-X to avoid bus saturation: again I have no idea
Setting Up the Ideal Linux Desktop (It Management) Posted Jan 22, 2009 6:50 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
You can attach six drives to the on-board SATA of many motherboards. For instance, I have an Intel board with a 965 chipset, and it has six SATA ports on the board.
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