unix machine specs

[tonyjob]

im trying to learn unix and i want to build a unix computer and i was just wondering what the best specs would be for a unix machine and how they would differ, if at all, from a pc running windows.

i want to use a text based unix so i quess i dont need a good graphics card, but what about other things?


thanks for any help/ideas.

Tony

 

[KarveR]

My old linux machine was a p150 with 16mb ram, it ran just fine but when I started hosting a TFC server and added mysql and PHP plus lots of other stuff I changed it to a p2 450. ______________________________________________________________________
There's no present like the time, they say. - Henry's Cat.

 

[edfair]

486 or higher, better with parity memory support, and no plug and pray.
SCSI ISA controller , preferably older adaptec because it is supported best, and keep all the filesystem stuff SCSI. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[rycamor]

If you want a full Unix experience with cheaper hardware, I suggest FreeBSD (

http://www.freebsd.org).

FreeBSD tends to behave more like the traditional Unix than most Linux distributions (Slackware Linux is the exception). You will find FreeBSD to require a little more up-front study to understand it, but the benefits are great. I can start with a pair of FreeBSD boot floppies, doing an internet-based install of FreeBSD, and be up and running with a full-featured server within 30 minutes. This includes Apache, PHP, Postgresql, MySQL, etc... Also, the default install is arguably much more secure than a default RedHat or Mandrake Linux install.

I have installed FreeBSD on machines as small as a 486 with 8 MB RAM, and still managed to even compile Apache/PHP/MySQL from source (although that will take a day or so). For most standard software and utilities, FreeBSD maintains an excellent software repository called the "ports collection", which allows you to install any package quickly and easily, over the net.

But, if you really want to learn Unix, you should learn how to compile software from source, rather than just installing executable binaries. Apache, PHP, etc... these all give you incredible amounts of flexibility when you compile for your own needs, and the performance is usually better, because you can optimize it for your machine.

My recommendation for a good starter machine is something like a Pentium II 350, or thereabouts, with a basic 9GB SCSI hard drive, or a modern ATA-66 or ATA-100 IDE drive, and 256 MB RAM, and a standard 10/100 network card (3Com, Linksys, etc...). You should be able to find something like this almost for free these days. SCSI drives and RAM are more important for Unix than processor speed, because they use processors very efficiently. With this combination, you should have no trouble quickly compiling most of the standard Unix server software out there. -------------------------------------------

Big Brother: "War is Peace" -- Big Business: "Trust is Suspicion"
(

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html)

 

[jad]

woa! thats a meaty machine

we have some 486's running solaris around here, and we used to have 386's running 2.0 kernel linux (but the power supplies blew up one by one ... so they've gone in the bin)

9Gb disk? wow ... thats big.

when i were a lad we only had 20Mb and we were happy with that ;P

seriously P166's should do you fine for a workstation, of course if you have more to throw at it then all the better.

 

[rycamor]

Yes, it's a meaty machine, but companies are literally throwing away hardware like that these days ;-). I mean, Intel is about to release a 3.6Ghz P4. Think about it: that is literally 10 times as fast as the machine I mention above.

Again, I am speaking about the U.S. point of view, where most hardware has a 3-4 year life cycle. I know in many other countries, this is not the case. However, I was surprised at this one: in '98/99, I collected a large number of 486 and Pentium motherboards, RAM, etc... for free from companies that were throwing it away. I thought I would ship it all to my father-in-law's company in Jamaica. They ended up hardly using any of it, because hardware has gotten so cheap that new machines were no big deal. It's great for us Unix guys, because we can literally build a cluster of machines for free ;-). -------------------------------------------

Big Brother: "War is Peace" -- Big Business: "Trust is Suspicion"
(

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html)

 

[williambishop]

It is far more than 10 times faster. MHZ are not cumulative of prior clock speeds from older arch's(i.e. p1,p2,p3,p4)

 

[tnelson1]

Actually it is less than 10 times faster (probably closer to 5 or 6 times). The P-Pro, P-II, P-III and P4 are all based on the same archetecture. There have been studies that show that a P3 actually runs faster than a P4 at the same Mhz. Double the Mhz does not equal double the speed, etc. If that was the case, then how come an AMD chip running at 1.8 Ghz is as fast or faster than a P4 running at 2.2 Ghz? Mhz is only part of the speed equation. A car running at more RPM, doesn't make it faster....the same goes for computers.