[TriLUG] OT: hardware question

[Andrew Perrin]

Thanks for all these quick replies. I think I'm going to back off the RAM
idea, at least for now; secondwind has some boxes for cheap enough that
it's probably worth it just to grab one of those and make this machine
into a firewall and/or file server for the home. I'm thinking a P2 at
450Mhz should work pretty well.

Since you asked, here's what this machine does. It's my main desktop at
home; it's connected to my DSL line, and does ipmasq'ing for several other
machines (two laptops and my wife's desktop). It runs samba, but only to
allow printing from the windows machines.  It runs OpenSSH so when I
forget files at home I can use scp to get them from afar. And it runs afsd
so I can use my work files from home.

My user applications are generally pretty light. Oft-used ones include
pine, emacs, latex, gv, xpdf, acroread, and jpilot. Hogs are netscape 4.75
(I agree with the poor state of browsing comment) and StarOffice, which I
have to use because I get Word docs in the mail far too
often.  Periodially I run R, but more commonly I ssh to my office machine
to do that, since a 1Ghz PIII with 512MB is, well, significantly faster
than this machine....

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin at unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
 Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
      269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA


On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Chris Hedemark wrote:

> JD writes:
> > Considering the price old edo simms (I don't know, but I imagine they are
> > expensive), I would venture to say
> > you will be better offspending money on a new cpu.
> 
> Or just be more realistic about what will run on this iron.
> 
> Some of the apps you mentioned are clearly meant for bigger iron than this.
> I think a lot of newer apps are written by fresh young programmers who have
> no concept of writing tight efficient code, and that have an attitude that
> hardware is cheap.  KDE, Gnome, Evolution, and Mozilla are great examples of
> this.
> 
> On the flip side you can select applications that may not be as feature rich
> but will effectively act like a CPU upgrade on the machine.  For example,
> instead of running KDE or Gnome, try Window Maker or icewm.  Instead of
> running Evolution try pine.  As for Mozilla, well, to be honest I haven't
> found a web browser yet on Unix that I like.  The feature rich browsers tend
> to be fat and slow, and crash often.  The lightweight browsers tend to have
> trouble rendering many popular sites.  You may be stuck with bloatware on
> the browser front.
> 
> So much attention is paid towards scaling Linux up onto bigger and better
> hardware.  IMHO more attention needs to be paid to scaling down as well.  If
> Linux is to "take over the world" it needs to run on machines that the rest
> of the world runs.  Remember, outside of the few highly developed nations,
> computers are a very rare and expensive commodity.   Our public schools are
> literally throwing out machines that these people would have to pay a few
> months wages for.
> 
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