Just wondering - Best linux hardware

T

Tetrahedron

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 24, 2004
Messages
1,579
What is everyones opinion, who wishes to share, happens to be the best hardware for running linux with cedega? Of course nvidia for graphics since it has the best supported and functional... I mean I am an ATi guy usually, but I have used and owned nivida in the past... but I am also an AMD guy as well, Intel isnt something I care to use much... but am willing to use if it happens to have the best support and functionality ( I have heard that it is) when using a linux distro and cedega..

so what are everyones thoughts? comments? if possible, it would surely help to have specific hardware named, as in mobos and chipset.
 
This may not be a specific answer to your question but you could head over to www.linuxquestions.org. At the top of the page click on the link marked, "HCL" which stands for, "Hardware Compatibility List." There you will find a list of hardware linux users have found to be, well, compatible.

In my limited experience I've found Ubuntu to be compatible with nVidia graphics cards and motherboard chipsets. It also plays nicely with Athlon + and Athlon 64 processors. I'm running a 64-bit Ubuntu at home and it works very well with my Venice 3200+. Mepis Linux played nicely with an older PIII 700 as a file server and general web surfing machine.

Others may back me up when I say more memory and a relatively fast processor helps when running Cedaga. That is, I wouldn't run it on a PIII for example.
 
From my very limited experience with Gentoo and Ubuntu, I can say with all truthfullness that you do not want to get a Creative sound card.
 
Linux can run on most everything! i had some old toshiba laptop that i installed DamnSmall (yes thats a distro look it up!) on it still runs even tho it wont run any form of windows. I have a P1 200mhz runnin Vector Linux which acts as a content filtering server. I have a celeron 600mhz running Ubuntu 6.06 runs great little slower then it did when i had it on my main pc but all together good.

Sometimes it varies from distro to distro. best thing to do if your not running on your main machine is download some of the popular ones and install them if they dont work reformat and try the next one!

Linux is fun once you get the hang of it.
 
Audigy 1/2 cards work with hardware mixing, but I would not recommend getting an X-Fi, since Creative doesn't give a crap about supporting them and maybe, just maybe will provide drivers in another year. My workstation has Intel 24-bit HD Azalea, seems to work fine.

nVidia based cards are the way to go, of course, if you want 3D hardware acceleration close to the performance you'd expect in Windows. You know something is up with ATi's 3d acceleration drivers when their newer cards can be shamed by, say, a GeForce 5800. :p

As for chipsets - I've only ever used Intel chipsets on Linux machines. The i875 was a winner (since that's been my main linux comp for 3 years).

Network controller - I use both broadcoms and Intel Pro/1000s, but it really shouldn't matter unless you have something amazingly exotic. Unless you have wireless, in which case you might have one with available drivers, or you might have to use ndiswrapper.

I might be building a more modern computer soon enough, so we'll see how it goes (Core 2 Duo, nVidia 79x0, intel 975/965 mobo, blah blah).
 
For video cards, stick with Nvidia. They're light years ahead of ATI in terms of Linux support.

I've had no issues with Intel HD audio and AC97 in-kernel drivers. I don't really use my linux machine for music/movies/etc so I haven't tested anything higher end than that.

Almost any chipset is going to be supported with newer kernels. Even if you're running something like a 2.4 kernel, the chipset might show up as unknown (or something along those lines), but I've never seen it cause problems (several customers run ancient Red Hat 7.3 on stuff like X6/X7 series Supermicro Xeon boards without any issues).

SATA controllers *can* be an issue, especially if you use an add-in RAID card. Best idea is to do a bit of googling before choosing...

I haven't really run into too many problems with NICs. The e1000 driver (for intel gigabit ethernet) does not work with the stock 2.6.8 kernel included in Debian Sarge 3.1. That's easily solved by a kernel upgrade though.
 
thanks for all the input this will surely help. :)


im looking at the HCL on linuxquestions.org and I dont see support for PCI-e ?? Im sure linux must support this standard right?
 
Yes there is PCI-E support, I run both the Areca 1220 and my 7800gt on PCI-E (in 64bit even)

Gentoo 2.6.14-r5
 
pci-e.jpg
 
mdameron said:
and why is that and what should you use?
Click to expand...
JPEG is meant for photographs and similar images, while gif or png is meant for computer-generated graphics and other things with large fields of uniform color and such.
JPEG is also lossy, so it will look less good than the original (this is much more obvious on computer graphics than photos), while a gif/png will be identical, color depth permitting.

Just try: Take a new screenshot like that one, and save it as both jpeg and png. The png will most likely be smaller and look better.
(On the other hand, png is awful for photographs.)
 
It's 48kb and color doesn't matter... I fail to see any constructive arguement here as it is just a SS of a xterm window...

P.S. Thanks for getting off topic.
 
Volkum said:
It's 48kb and color doesn't matter... I fail to see any constructive arguement here as it is just a SS of a xterm window...
Click to expand...

With a png, you'd use about a fourth of the size [1], and the text would look better and be easier to read. Besides, using the right format helps make a good impression.
We're not saying this to be eliteist, btw. Take it as well-meant advice. :)

[1] I just tested here with a very similar image, and got 49.4 vs 13.7 KB.
 
Anyone interested in making a good impression when posting screenshots like these, should invest some time in pngout. It's awesome.

(I usually drop down to paletted mode also, which saves a bundle of bytes, but sadly there's no remapper in pngout so you have to go via another utility)
 
I have Yellow Dog running on an original Bondi Blue iMac, 233MHz, 32MB RAM, 4GB HDD and a cheap ATI card. It runs like a dog, but it runs. I'm sure if I threw in 512MB RAM, it would be more useable, but I don't really need it to be. It might end up just being a jukebox anyway.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top