Re: Migrating to Linux/Octave

[James Knowles]

AMD has done a great job of bang for the buck. AMD won't be phasing out 
32-bit chips anytime soon, simply renaming and remarketing things. The 
Athlon XP will essentially become their low-end "bargain" CPUs. There 
are 64-bit Linux distributions, but I wouldn't consider it to be a must 
have unless you're wanting to eek out every bit of power.

My main concern is ensuring that the hardware is fuss-free. A couple of 
months ago I got a new motherboard, but didn't follow guidelines and am 
not happy with the hardware, though it works. I've had X lock up on me a 
few times in the last few months, which is *#)&@& annoying. Nvidia's 
drivers are kind of flaky. Great cards when they work, though.

Everybody has their opinions, but we've have little to no problems with 
AMD CPUs, ASUS mobos, 1GB+ RAM, Intel network cards, unfortunately the 
Matrox G400 style video cards are passe. I've not tried the latest 
Matrox cards, but since the Millenium II cards, we've been very pleased 
with them under Linux. We don't do anything fancy other than drive 
displays at very high resolutions; no 3D stuff, really.

Also, we install *two* hard drives and use software RAID to mirror the 
drives. Few things suck as bad a dead hard drive. It's uncommon, but 
RAID has saved the day repeatedly. Anybody remember years ago the IBM 
30GB drives that rolled off a new factory in the former East Block -- 
Hungary IIRC??? Nasty failure rates. We lost four drives within a few 
months. Without RAID we would have been toast.

Of course, it all depends on what you want. I'm interested in 
workstations I don't have to futz with. ;-)




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