What Is The Perfect Hardware For The Perfect Linux Box?
 

Hi all,

I know this is a very open question, which is probably impossible to answer precisely, but if you had to venture an opinion:

What is the perfect combination of hardware for SUSE 10.2 (or Ubuntu Edgy)?

By "perfect", I mean the hardware would give me (almost) out-of-the-box support for:

- Power management (suspend, hibernate, reboot, restart)

- Screen resolution / graphics card

- Mouse and keyboard (including navi-keys, scroll wheel, etc.)

These are the things I have the worst problems with on my current hardware. I can get the correct screen resolution by hacking xorg.conf, and to some extent the navi-keys and mouse buttons work if I hack around with xmodmap, but the power management is simply awful in every single of the six or seven distros I've tried so far. No amount of hacking in acpi-support helps; either my computer won't shut down, hibernate, suspend, or reboot. With a little luck I can get it to do two out of three, but *never* reliably. Often, hibernate fails to resume, or the screen blanks and just stops there.

I really want to use Linux, but I also really need these things to work as smoothly as they do with Windows. I am willing to hack a few .conf-files, but in return I need a "guarantee" that my hacks will make things work eventually.

So... any tips for what motherboard, gfx card, monitor, etc., I should buy to get the perfect Linux box?

Thanks!

Peter

I've had suspend-to-RAM working on my hardware in the past, but it broke when I got a new graphics card.

I don't know of any mobo that will give guaranteed flawless ACPI support to a Linux PC. If you find one, let me know!

If you can stand to wait a while, AMD plans on releasing MoBos with LinuxBIOS installed, I hear, and they *should* work 100% with Linux. In theory, anyway.

I would say to get a Foxconn motherboard. I got one for my PC and I've had absolutely no problems.
As for GFX card. There's countless ways you could go about answering this. I think that NVidia would be the best because (as far as I can remember) there's a bunch of Packages for Ubuntu to utilise NVidia GFX cards to their full extent.
As for monitor, I would most definitely (IMO) go for 17" CRT that can handle 1280*1024*32. Much better image quality than LCD.
As for mouse, I have had go get a few. Most definitely get an optical mouse. (I have found that a mouse with a ball gets gummed up very quickly and then I got annoyed and pounded it and the poor thing went crunch!) Optical mice cost a little more than an ordinary mouse but they are really worth it.
Now, for keyboard. Get something you'd be comfortable using for several hours.I got a multimedia keyboard from Tesco for roughly 8UKP. the multimedia keys on that worked out of the box.

Phew. That went on for a fair bit.
Oh, one last word. This time about processors. Mine's a 2Ghz Celeron. I've noted that if you're running a few apps at thte same time it can really take a h*ll of a long time to do something. Go for the best processor you can afford.
Well, that's my :twocents:, sorry about dragging it on for so long.

Right, I'm suspecting my NVidia 7600GS (or the driver for it) to be the culprit. I've read somewhere that it won't "let go"/permit itself to be unloaded when the ACPI daemon tries to suspend/power off the system. I haven't been able to ascertain whether that's true, however...

That sounds *very* interesting! Do you have any interesting links to share?

Peter

I've never heard of Foxconn before. I will have to look into that.

That's not an option. I abandoned CRTs four years ago, and I don't plan to buy one again, ever.

We don't have Tesco here, but if you could tell me the brand name I could perhaps get one elsewhere.

I plan to go for a Core 2 Duo unless AMD releases those Linux mobos I was told about previously in this thread.

Thanks for your input!

Peter

If "perfect" means everthing works "out of the box" then you might want to consider purchasing a pre-built system from a source that sells pre-built linux systems!!! Some that come to mind are www.monarchcomputers.com, www.system76.com, and there certainly are a number of others...

good luck.

Try Linux.com

Also, the OLPC project uses LinuxBIOS, so take a look at some of their pages if you're curious..

I've had no problems with the Gigabyte mobo I bought in June '06. The module for the temperature sensor wasn't available until kernel version 2.6.19 except from the vendor. My mobo has on-board sound using an nVidia chipset. I had to use an Intel driver to make it work. That took about 5 minutes of Googling to figure out. My USB keyboard didn't work with the GRUB menu at first because I forgot to change the setting in the BIOS.

<---- Works with both of these distros just fine.