Ideal Slackware system for £500 - ideas ?
 

I will hopefully be in a position to purchase a new system for about £500 UK pounds. I would like to run Slackware 11 on this with a small XP partition for dual boot. I would ideally be using Slack as a desktop but also playing with the server side of things (LAMP). Anyone any idea of a suitable system - i.e. base unit,DVDRW,17 " TFT, mouse and keyboard ? The reason I ask is because I don't know the driver issues with all video boards, drives, network cards etc and wondered if anyone had any thoughts on such a system with regards to compatibility issues.Thanks in advance.. Oh - BTW - I have an existing network to plug this into so I don't need to worry about modems/routers/ADSL adapters and the like - and no need for printers, scanners, cameras or other goodies.

you can probably get a core2duo a gig of ram and a decent nvidia card for under 500pounds.

The monitor will probably cost you more than the tower.

I'd go for nvidia graphics card, disks, DVDRWs are afaik all good in compatibility terms.

If you'll go for Intel Core 2 (which has currently best price-performance ratio, I think), I'd pay a lot of attention of what sata controllers are onboard (probably also other MB components - network card, sound card, chipset...). I set up an core 2 box with an Asus MB recently, and I must tell that I was not impressed with the compatibility of JMicron sata controller and also the "onboard" (both are defacto onboard, but one is more integrated...) one did not work without some tweaking. 2.6.19 kernels seem to adress this sata mess (I used 2.6.19.x on the system I installed), but this kernel is not available on slackware install disk, so you still have trouble installing. But there is a lot of helping material on LQ and other forums...

However, if you choose AMD, nforce-based MBs tend to be very smoothy detected, afaik.

So, I think the only component you should _really_ be carefull when choosing, is motherboard.

Thanks very much - just the info i was looking for. I'll be looking into it .

Cheers