New Computer

[Justbill 0]

Hi All!

I'm getting ready to purchase a new computer, in the next week or so and thought I would check in here, before going shopping. Currently I have an old

HP Vectra

Pentium II 233Mz

192 ram

60 gig Western Digital Harddrive

 

I currently have Win98, and Fedora Core3, on this machine. I relly only boot win98 when I need to print something, as, I have never gotten my Lexmark z515 printer to work under Linux. Which brings me to my question. Does anyone have any suggestions on what machine would be a good purchase? I assume, whatever I get will probably have winXP on it. I would then set my partition and, most likely install FC3. As I said earlier, I have never gotten my lexmark printer to work with FC3, Puppy, or even SimplyMepis. I would like to try to find something that is just going to work "out of the box". I've only been messing with computers for about a year and a half now, so command lines, and mount points and such, are still sort of a mystery to me. Most everything (except printing) worked on this machine under FC3, cd burnning was a breeze, auto detected my camera with no problem, so all I can guess is that, some printers, and, computers for that matter work better than others with Linux. So, any thoughts?

 

Thanks

Justbill

[danleff 0]

Although this is very subjective (recommending systems), have you thought about buying a Linux system?

 

Any computer should work, just remember that most come with winmodems, especially HP, gateways and Compaq systems. If you have broadband, this is not an issue. Just remember, HP and Compaq systems often have a hidden recovery partition, so don't change any partitioning scheme at the beginning of the hard drive. Make your Fedora partition after the NTFS primary partition. Fedora Core 3 will play nice with NTFS as the primary partition. Previous versions had problems with this.

 

If you plan on using Fedora Core 3 on a new system, consider a system with ide drive(s) rather than sata. Sata support is good in Fedora Core 4 test 2, but lacking in previous versions. Or, if you don't want to wait for support right away, you could live on the wild side.

 

If you choose a system that comes with a printer anyway, look for an HP printer, or Canon. Most are well supported, except the muti-function printers. Look at Linuxprinting.org for ideas.

 

Try to find a system with a NVIDIA video card and save headaches. ATI support is getting better, but still can be a hassle.

 

Check out the available bios options in the system. You may want support for booting via usb, if you plan to use any of the mini-distros that can boot off a usb stick.

 

What else in terms of hardware are you looking for?

[LinuxCrusader 0]

Hay Karamba! What's your budget like? You know what they say...the higher the numbers that you see on the add for the computer, the better it is, except of course for the price. You coult try building your own system. Get yourself a good motherboard with agp, modern cpu, good amount of ram and a high storage for your hard disk and you'll be on business (and don't forget video andn network cards). This way you don't have worry about buying the box and the OS (xp) at the same time...just a suggestion. I would research on the parts that you will buy of course. This way you will have fun putting your box together and you will become confident that if you can put the box together than you can also break it and remake it, well you'll know what's going on, plus you might save yourselve a couple of hundred bucks which you could use to buy a modern printer...just my suggestion.

[ScinteX 0]

Just my 2p's worth.... my ATI works ok with the livna drivers. My card is a 9800XT and I get something silly like 5500 fps when I run glxgears.

It might be a fluke it's working however the point above about ATI is still valid - I had the luck of finding a really good guide about ATI, FC3.. and the drivers (I can't find it right now though).

In general nVidia will save your brain from meltdown

 

A general look around seems to indicate nVidia performs better (I'll get shot for saying that) but the FPS is higher. After a bit of tweaking I might get the FPS back up to 12000 like before, however generally, nVidia looks good.

 

I'd build my own PC- as mentioned above the advantages are plenty. I built this machine (below in my sig) and I must say it runs so fast as I went for a best of breed approach (at the time).

 

[Justbill 0]

Welllllllll,

I got it! Its a

Compaq Presario SR1426NX

Pentium IV 2.93Ghz Processor

512MB PC2-3200 DDR2 SDRAM

Double Layer 16X DVD+R/RW drive with CD writer capabilities

160 Gig Harddrive

So far it seems nice (compared to what I had, its a miracle), I haven't had time to try to load FC3 yet, so we still have to see how that is going to go. The plan is to dual boot windows XP and FC3, well thats the plan anyway, wish me luck!

Thanks for the input and advice, on this decision, this is my first NEW machine, and I think I got a pretty good one (XP seems to be running well, like lightning compared to my old box).

 

Thanks again

Justbill