I am looking for a machine to run Linux on, I have read the various
faqs, and waded through various PC magazines, but I don't claim to be
an expert on PC hardware so I have a few questions. Rather than
flooding the newgroup, flood my mail box and I will summarize.

I want a fast machine, but I don't want to go spending my money on
hardware which is going to take a lot of effort to make Linux work.
Come to think of it, since this would be my only possible development
platform, I want something which will definitely run Linux. 

I am probably looking at a 486DX (33 or 50) with about 200 Mbytes
of disk and 4 to 8 Mbytes of memory, after that it gets a bit
hazy.


1. The Bus

The FAQ states that you must have an ISA bus machine, yet I am sure
I have seen at least one message describing EISA hardware. What is
the restriction here? What about 32 bit local buses? I don't really
want to put my disk at the other end of ISA when I could put it
much nearer the CPU, or does the bus not become a bottle neck unless
you have a really high speed disk?


2. Disk Drives & Controllers

Will a caching controller make much difference with Linux? I know
there was a discussion on this a while back, but I don't recall if
it came to any sort of consensus. I would imagine that money spent
on a caching controller would be as well spent on more system memory.

How much of a performance difference does SCSI make?


3. Display Hardware

I want to be able to run X-windows, but I am tempted by some of the
newer local bus video cards with chipsets not supported by X386.
I want at least 1024 X 768, but 1280 x 1024 would be better.
I am willing to put some effort into making X work on more hardware,
but I don't really know if things like the S3 are so dedicated
to supporting SVGA that the requirements of an X server won't
map onto them well.

I also don't know much about PC display hardware, is the display
always memory mapped, or do you have to go through other hardware
to do some operations. I guess my ideal device is something which
is memory mapped, but with hardware assist which can be turned on
function by function as code is written.

=========

If people e-mail me their hardware configurations or suggestions
I will summerize to the net.

This includes people who have tried to run Linux and failed because
of hardware incompatibilities.

Let me know as much of the following as possible (and anything else
you thing might be important) :-

 o Manufacturer and model number
 o CPU, clock speed, bus type and memory size
 o disk controller and disk
 o graphics hardware, not just the chip type, but card type, where
   it is plugged in, and 
 o problems you encountered trying to get Kernel/file system/X
   to run on your machine which were because of hardware.
   Things like disk/graphics controller XYZ does not work would be
   just as useful as the fact that they do work.



Judging from the number of different systems available, I suspect
that no two machines will be identical, but hopefully some useful
information will come out of this.

Thanks in advance

        Steve Lord


==============================================================================
Steve Lord                                      voice: +1-612-683-5291
Cray Research Inc                               email: lord@cray.com (Internet)
655F Lone Oak Drive
Eagan, MN, 55121, USA
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==============================================================================
Steve Lord                                      voice: +1-612-683-5291
Cray Research Inc                               email: lord@cray.com