I am looking for a very inexpensive ( << $1000) machine to use at home for a dedicated Linux box for software development. I am planning to use this machine to work at home. The machine I use at work is a dual Opteron, 64 bit, 2 GB memory. I know I can't duplicate this machine at home for $1K or less, but what can I realistically expect for my money. Machine must take PCI-Express Video card. I have a monitor, keyboard, mouse etc. so I can take a bare bones system. I am asking for recommendations because I want to make sure I get a machine that I won't (probably won't) have compatibility issues with. I plan to use SuSE 10.0, and possibly RTLinux.

Thanks,
CV

I picked up a used tower case at a local shop($10) and newegged everything else.

1.Good 500 watt(antec) power supply $70.

2.Seagate 320mg sata 3.0gb/s $95.

3. CdRW used (local)yamaha $12

4. Asus A8N-5x $85

5. 2gb(2x1gb) corsair memory $185

6. amd 3800+ x2 $155

That is a crappy system. Antec power supplies are shit. Corsair memory is ok, but I recommend ECC memory for any system. Seagate drives are crap. They have poor accessing time and consumes more processor resources than others. Also Seagate SATA hard drives are a pain to setup DMA. I suggest the following.

SeaSonic S12-430 (430 watts) $100
Gigabyte GA-M55plus-S3G (AM2 Socket) $90
Western Digital Caviar RE WD1600SB 160GB $75
2 Kingston 512MB DDR2-800 ECC (CM72DD512AR-400) $91.50/module
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (AM2 Socket) $113
TEAC 1.44 MB (FD235HFC291S) $14.99@zipzoomfly.com

Just select any optical drive and any computer case. It may have half the memory capacity but you can buy four modules and you still will be under $1000. The motherboard has on-board nVidia graphics so you do not have to buy a video card for the setup. The board does have an even share of both PCI and PCIe slots. If you want to know how well your programs can compile with two processors, you can get the X2 processor like the AMD Athlon64 X2 4600+ for $319. It will still be under $1000 if you get the X2 processor and get four memory modules. The setup will be noiseless, reliable and stable compared to lazlow suggested setup.

Brand opinions/prefences aside I would skip the floppy. As long as you can boot to the CD/DVDrom, the floppy is essentially worthless. The only thing left that they are comonly used for is bios updates and you can do those from a bootable cd/DVD. Any file that is small enough to fit on a floppy is small enough to be emailed. If you have a bunch of stuff around on floppies or just want one I would get a usb floppy drive. Then you can use it on any machine quickly.

Take a look at your memory useage on your work machine. If you are not using the 2nd gb then skip it, but the direction things are going on memory usage I hate to "throw away" memory I have purchased. (1gb->4gb you would have to pull the 2x512 sticks to add the 4 1x1gb sticks). This is much more critical if you ever go 64bit.

Lazlow