How compatible will my new PC be with Linux?

[Kano]

I would use a Intel Q9550 on a P45 board, should oc much better...

[EarthMind]

Thanks for the suggestion but an Intel CPU is a no go for me, plus I don't plan to overclock any of the hardware

[Adarion]

Hi EarthMind

I'm very unfamiliar with the kernel, I'm just a level or two above a regular user and don't know much about the insides. Google helps me most of the time. Btw, I'll be using Mandriva and/or Ubuntu.

Ah, well. Once you did kernel configuration a few times it will loose some of its horror. Still every new version brings features that probably only kernel developers understand. Also some of them are rather undocumented. :/
It was because of the powersteppers, but when you're going to use some normal distribution it should be all in. It needs a CPU-vendor specific driver (and also CPU-generation specific), these are in kernel. Then the next choice is the governor, a prog inside the kernel (or userland) that will decide how to handle frequency stepping. There is e.g. "performance" which keeps always freq. at maximum, the so called "powersave" which does the opposite (but doesn't really save power) and the best soulution is ondemand/conservative. They set frequency depending on CPU load. So if you just browse phoronix forums or write some text then frq. will be at the lowest point. If you do compiling or excessive gaming, audio or video compression it will raise frq. to max.
Very useful and will save you and the environment a lot of wasted power.

Furthermore I think newer AMD models are also able to set frq. to the (multi)cores individually for each core and I saw during my Kernel 2.6.30 config that "CPU hotplugging support" was automatically enabled. That seems they already built in to switch off cores completely. My 4850e is older generation so it has always the same frq. on both cores and a minimum of 2x1000MHz and both cores on (but I have a system suckup measured on the power plug of 45W when idle so it's ok). Newer CPUs might switch off one (or more cores in your case) completely if not needed.
I'm not giving any warranty on this info but I thought AMD planned to do so and I guess it should be workin meanwhile.
Would be interesting to see some power figures of your box when it is finished.
Your disribution should to that hopefully all out of the box.

That's also one of the reasons I won't be buying a notebook instead of a new PC (lifetime being the biggest one).

Yep. When something on a notebook is broken you can often throw this "black box enclosed in resin" away as a whole. And if a component will not work in linux because the manufracturer refuses to give out specs then you can't just leave it out of your concept.
Still from time to time I'd really need a notebook but still I found none yet. Though there are a few good signs emerging at the horizon.

That's 40-50 EUR cheaper!

Indeed. But so make sure to check a few online shops. This mix-computer folks delivered ok to me, just make sure it's on stock. (Look for the green "LED" in their shop. Yellow can mean some delay, red is currently out (could be ordered) and blue is only on your request (often the horribly expensive things that normally nobody orders).
I don't know about shipment to .be though so make sure to check it first.
Mix has not the lowest shipment costs here but for a large order they have a good sortiment of stuff and the prices are nice in most cases. Alternate has also often a lot of stuff to choose from but they are pricey sometimes and they're MS gold or something partners and yes, I'm a little bit of a fanatic when it comes to certain enterprises. Like MS.

I'm not sure whether to go 64 yet because of compatibility issues.

Well. As far as I know you only need RAM if the shared mem option is used (normally with onboard chips). Some models have so called side port RAM which is a dedicated VRAM for onboards.
W32 will not even let you use the full 4GB.
Linux can give you access to all of it if neccessary and with PAE even more (if you have more RAM). Still a 64bit one would be better in this case. I run a 64bit Gentoo system for some years and on the linux side I have no problems. Adobe Flash was a pain somewhere y'know, but that always is a p.i.t.a. regardless if it's 32 or 64bit browser plugin.
It's normally only the closed source stuff that makes problems. And there are few things in the Gentoo x86 tree that are not yet in Gento's amd64 tree.
On the other hand the AMD CPUs will run most 32bit code with nearly the same speed as native 64bit code.
But I suggest you to start with 4 or less GB of RAM first. You can add more later if you really need it.

I've been working with USB 1.1 for years

I still have a box in use with USB 1.1 and I really notice the difference, esp. since I do some digital photography and then copying 1-2GB of data off a compact flash card... huh. You don't want to do this on USB 1.1.

using my CRT screen

Ah, yep. When they are not too old some models still offer good image quality.
The TFTs save some power (about 50-70%) so that was the trigger for me to switch. Still there are few 4:3 ones out there. Everybody is only producing these 16:9 stuff. *shrugs*
And VGA is handy for some beamers and so on. I mean, the VGA finally was a standard, and it was widespread. DVI was just starting to spread then they came with their stupid HDMI (copy/play protectings thanks to HDCP) and now there is even DisplayPort (which also received some play protection...). So which to use now?

I hope it won't matter if it's floppy disk or CD because I won't be using a floppy drive in my new PC.

Normally yes. Often they offer a file with the BIOS image, then you need the flasher (often awdflash or something like that) and you can put it on USB media and boot from a freeDOS bootCD and start the flashing.
Even more comfortable is this in BIOS prog where you just have any VFAT media with the image file and there you go.
Though one has to wonder if MS get nasty with their trivial shit patents on long filenames for VFAT. (First they "invent" a horribly old filesystem with a limitation to 8.3 and then they extend this very 8.3 scheme with some crutch and patent it and later sue everybody who has some implementation of long filenames on VFAT. Stupid.
But back to topic.

I'll be testing with the onboard one first and if it works as it should I'll be buying the GTX 260. And yeah , I'll be needing it for windows/Linux games mostly.

I'm not sure how far nvidia is with a real hybrid system that will switch off the big card when you do office work and switch it on when you need it for gaming. The dedicated GPU cards are often by far the biggest powersuckers on today's systems.
I took my HD3870 out, even though it's passively cooled, but it still sucked too much power and I did not want this since I "recently" (the last 3-4 months) lacked the time for gaming.

That's too bad, I have good experience with Plextor.

Oh yes. Back at the time when they built their own drives I had one and it was a really neat CD Writer. It wrote everything besides their own plextor CDR/CDRW media, whatever that was meant to be... lol.
But today...
And you will find stories probably about any hardware vendor making some mistakes. I remember LG and when one put on mandriva the setup routing used the FLUSH_CACHE ATA command to check if it is a burner or a CDROM/DVDROM drive. Ah well. And what did the LG? It flushed the firmware instead the write buffer and bricked itself.
That's some years ago now but things like that happen from time to time.
B.t.w. it was not Plextor itself with the sueing, it was the mother company, some international business group, I forgot what they were called.
It was inexcusable for me since Plextor did not even offer their PlexTools for anything but windows. So they should have been in joy that someone did the job of making the full power of the devices accessible to non-windows-users.
I would maybe have understood if they sold their tools for Linux but so...

Der von Ihnen gew?hlte DDR2-Speicher entspricht nicht dem JEDEC Standard. Daher werden wir diesen Speicher auf JEDEC-konforme DDR2-800 Timings einstellen, falls Sie die Konfiguration inklusive Zusammenbau bestellen.

The memory you have chosen does not comply with the JEDEC standards. That's why whe will set the RAM timings to a JEDEC conformous DDR2-800 if your order this config including assembly of the computer.

So I dunno which RAM you chose but for compatibility reasons they wanted to clock it to 800. Ah, as it was said just stick to standard DDR2-800 RAM, that should do fine, not be much slower and maybe even a little bit cheaper.

Good luck with your box and feel free to ask quastions.

PS:

Intel CPU is a no go for me,

Yes, I mean they normally build fine CPUs but then I remember the time when there were the pentium1s around and they suddenly dropped prices from 1000 DM (500E) to 500DM( 250E). So I saw what I haid paid just for the name "intel". And later they sued DVD-inside, just some harmless news forum for new DVD and movie releases. Just because of the "inside".
Whoa. "Jokes" like this. That did it for me.

[EarthMind]

Ah, well. Once you did kernel configuration a few times it will loose some of its horror. Still every new version brings features that probably only kernel developers understand. Also some of them are rather undocumented. :/
It was because of the powersteppers, but when you're going to use some normal distribution it should be all in. It needs a CPU-vendor specific driver (and also CPU-generation specific), these are in kernel. Then the next choice is the governor, a prog inside the kernel (or userland) that will decide how to handle frequency stepping. There is e.g. "performance" which keeps always freq. at maximum, the so called "powersave" which does the opposite (but doesn't really save power) and the best soulution is ondemand/conservative. They set frequency depending on CPU load. So if you just browse phoronix forums or write some text then frq. will be at the lowest point. If you do compiling or excessive gaming, audio or video compression it will raise frq. to max.
Very useful and will save you and the environment a lot of wasted power.

Furthermore I think newer AMD models are also able to set frq. to the (multi)cores individually for each core and I saw during my Kernel 2.6.30 config that "CPU hotplugging support" was automatically enabled. That seems they already built in to switch off cores completely. My 4850e is older generation so it has always the same frq. on both cores and a minimum of 2x1000MHz and both cores on (but I have a system suckup measured on the power plug of 45W when idle so it's ok). Newer CPUs might switch off one (or more cores in your case) completely if not needed.
I'm not giving any warranty on this info but I thought AMD planned to do so and I guess it should be workin meanwhile.
Would be interesting to see some power figures of your box when it is finished.
Your disribution should to that hopefully all out of the box.

Thanks for the thorough information. I do hope this will all be automatically configured because this sounds kind of complicated.

Indeed. But so make sure to check a few online shops. This mix-computer folks delivered ok to me, just make sure it's on stock. (Look for the green "LED" in their shop. Yellow can mean some delay, red is currently out (could be ordered) and blue is only on your request (often the horribly expensive things that normally nobody orders).
I don't know about shipment to .be though so make sure to check it first.
Mix has not the lowest shipment costs here but for a large order they have a good sortiment of stuff and the prices are nice in most cases. Alternate has also often a lot of stuff to choose from but they are pricey sometimes and they're MS gold or something partners and yes, I'm a little bit of a fanatic when it comes to certain enterprises. Like MS.

I checked out mix-computer.de and I have my doubts regarding them shipping to BE as there was no country option at checkout. I've sent them an E-mail and hopefully they'll reply asap. I did notice some components being a few euros cheaper, fortunately that will save me on shipping costs! :-)

Well. As far as I know you only need RAM if the shared mem option is used (normally with onboard chips). Some models have so called side port RAM which is a dedicated VRAM for onboards.
W32 will not even let you use the full 4GB.
Linux can give you access to all of it if neccessary and with PAE even more (if you have more RAM). Still a 64bit one would be better in this case. I run a 64bit Gentoo system for some years and on the linux side I have no problems. Adobe Flash was a pain somewhere y'know, but that always is a p.i.t.a. regardless if it's 32 or 64bit browser plugin.
It's normally only the closed source stuff that makes problems. And there are few things in the Gentoo x86 tree that are not yet in Gento's amd64 tree.
On the other hand the AMD CPUs will run most 32bit code with nearly the same speed as native 64bit code.
But I suggest you to start with 4 or less GB of RAM first. You can add more later if you really need it.

I've decided to go a bit lower than 4GB RAM because I doubt that I'll be using them fully, even with multitasking. I'll post my new hardware choices at the bottom.

I still have a box in use with USB 1.1 and I really notice the difference, esp. since I do some digital photography and then copying 1-2GB of data off a compact flash card... huh. You don't want to do this on USB 1.1.

The reason I bought a USB 2.0 PCI cart was because I also noticed a major difference between the two and it was practically NOT possible to use them with my 500GB external hard drive. It just took ages to transfer a file...

they came with their stupid HDMI (copy/play protectings thanks to HDCP)

I found out about that while searching for the right graphic card and luckily it helped me make the right decision.

Normally yes.

Luckily ASRock has both a BIOS flash utility and a Windows one so that answers my question.

And yes I'll still be going for ASRock, compared to the other motherboards I've checked they offer a full featured one for a good price, AND with an onboard NVidia GC <= that was a real PITA. I've searched for ASUS boards but didn't like them because either they didn't have an onboard NVidia GC or a bad (or too new) onboard sound card or one I've never heard of)

And you will find stories probably about any hardware vendor making some mistakes.

Hopefully I won't personally experience a mistake of that kind because I already got a big-ass headache from searching for the right hardware for my new PC...

Just because of the ...

That's daily stuff nowadays :P

My new hardware configuration looks like this:

AMD Phenom II 955 (yeah, ain't gonna lose this one :P)
Buffalo DIMM 2 GB DDR2-800 Select series (I'm starting off with 2GB 800mhz, I can always upgrade)
Seagate 1 TB Barracuda 7200.12 (ya never have 'nuf space)
ASRock K10N78
Some cheap ATX case, a not too heavy one
2 x case coolers

About the PSU, if I buy a 500W one, will it use that 500W all the time or only when needed? Because I was thinking of buying a 500W for when I'm ready to buy a GTX 260 card but I may change my mind depending on the power usage.

Thanks a bunch, you've been really helpful!!

[Adarion]

Thanks for the thorough information. I do hope this will all be automatically configured because this sounds kind of complicated.

It should do so.
Only if you're going to compile your own kernel (which can be a nice thing, and I do it always since I'm using Gentoo) you'll need to make a Kernel .config
Basically it's saying Y to the things where they say "if in doubt or if you do not know what it is say Y" and a knowing your hardware (lwhw, lsusb, lspci are helpful).

mix-computer.de

Darn, I looked at it and it had a saying that they only ship inside .de. Never needed it before so I didn't know. Anyway.

But there are still many other online shops around. B.t.w. in case you ever need a card reader or going to look for a new wifi installation you should look at www.tuxhardware.de, they do as the name says, they check the HW they sell if it runs with Linux. I got my card readers (I need them for the photography and as a modern floppy) from there and they do the job.

> Luckily ASRock has both a BIOS flash utility
Sounds good. Probably they use the same like their mother company ASUS.


>searched for ASUS boards but didn't like them
I'm not aware of the current situation for AM3 boards but choice was very limited months ago when I got my new AM2+.
And yes, ASUS sometimes puts on some stuff on some boards that is really strange.
Besides even the c't magazine noted that many vendors ship a lot of really stupid software for windows with their boards. And that was exactly what I thought when I had tried the stuff. They praise it to work wonders but it does nothing but ordinary things, redundant things when it does anything at all. Or it just fucks up the windows.
I'm so glad I don't have to mess with this in Linux. (Of course one doesn't have to mess in W32, too, but when there are 2 CDs with stuff, hey, you're going to have a look at it).

My new hardware configuration looks like this:

Looks nice and when the ASRock won't break on you... good thing.

About the PSU, if I buy a 500W one, will it use that 500W all the time or only when needed?

Nah, this 500W is the maximum dimension. Then there are also different max. wattages (or amperes) on the outgoing (or in-the-computer-ingoing) cables. I had an older on in my old box and when I attached two HDDs to one powerline the box would not boot. :/ (Heh, so I took the power from a different computer that stood directly besides the weak one. Strange construction but it worked some weeks until I got a new PSU.)

So this 500W is the max, and usually computers draw most power during POST / bootup. Because then everything starts, the HDDs draw max power and there is no powersaving at boot time.
Later when the Tux has kicked in with his powersteppers it will settle down.
But what the problem is, is that when you have a laaarge PSU the efficiency will be low when you don't use all that power. So some examples still had measurable watts running even in soft-poweroff-mode (ATX/ACPI-off) when you would expect <0.5W. But also when the box is drawing, let's say like my case 45W idle or my VIA with less than 20W idle the 500W would be wasting still too much power. The PSU should meet the dimensions of the box (at boot time) plus a little more if you want to add some HDDs later.

There are some nice PSUs around, some also with a very quiet fan. Absolutely fanless was no option for me since I had everything else passively cooled. So I don't know about these.
I have this Nesteq 400W one (very quiet, stable, power efficient, but already about a year old) plus 2 ultrasilent (inaudible) Scythe case fans. The BeQuiet ones aren't bad either, but I have 2 older models of these running and I don't know if they still serve my need for 350W and such or even lower. Can't tell much about the other firms but you should avoid ultracheap ones directly from China (m'kay, most stuff is mad in China nowadays). They're instable, loud, and have no efficiency. Some even have short cables (check this if you're going to use a tower case or something) so you can't attach the board to the PSU. Xp
They're just cheap, that's all.

Some also have a system where you have plugs and cords and only attach the ones you need. So you don't have many cables floating around and it looks cleaner inside the box if this is important for you.

[EarthMind]

Just noticed this at mix-computer:

Lieferung nur innerhalb Deutschlands.

So, that's too bad for me . I also noticed that the PhII 955 has risen with 10 EUR so I'll have to hurry.

Oh and just noticed your new post so I'll read that now.

[EarthMind]

Darn, I looked at it and it had a saying that they only ship inside .de. Never needed it before so I didn't know. Anyway.

I just noticed that too... I'll just stick with alternate as they are quite cheap compared to most shops in BE.

www.tuxhardware.de

Will remember that, thanks.

Looks nice and when the ASRock won't break on you... good thing.

Better try and see . If that happens then it'll be the last time I buy ASRock.

But what the problem is, is that when you have a laaarge PSU the efficiency will be low when you don't use all that power.

Will take that into account when choosing the PSU

Thanks very much for your help, it's time to buy now


Edit: It's already been risen with 30 EUR in those few minutes I was putting my PC together so I chose the PHII 940 CPU instead.

[AdrenalineJunky]

on the ASRock subject, i've been reading rave reviews on them from all over the net for a while now... they also make alot of the top customer rated motherboards on newegg...

i've had one in my pc for about 8 months now and its been working great for me.

[EarthMind]

on the ASRock subject, i've been reading rave reviews on them from all over the net for a while now... they also make alot of the top customer rated motherboards on newegg...

i've had one in my pc for about 8 months now and its been working great for me.

Yeah, same for me and that's why I didn't change my mind. I did read a lot that they are not really fit for overclocking fanatics.

[Adarion]

Note on your shipment: Consider possible taxes by the Belgian customs. Not sure if this applies but in .de iirc at above 50E the customs can charge you some fees.
And tuxhardware ships into EU countries on previous request.