Opteron Box, good price?

[Ototero]

Well, it's here. Ordered last Saturday, arrived Monday.
But I was working away from home all week. Got to play with it yesterday.

Package well, even came with a reasonably good quality keyboard and mouse (they were not listed on the advert). There was a large heatsink with 4 copper heat pipes + fan attached to the processor.

The only software that came with it was the HP ProLiant ML115 G5 Server Easy Set-up CD. When I ran this it gave me options of which OS to load, none of them was XP.

So I booted from an XP disk and installed XP Pro. Then came the problems. No drivers!

Searched the web for help, most people said use the W2K/2003 drivers. These worked ok, but the graphics aren't perfect. Good enough though.

I might download Win 2003 Server and play with that.

Ram is a bit short at 512 meg and at nearly £50 for another gig, it can wait.

It's crunching Dnet on it right now.

[AMDave]

If you run into more troubles with windows, you may like to know that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and CentOS 5.1 [x86_64] kick-ass on that box.

/ed - apparently SLED 9 and 10 do as well but I'm a hat wearer. - ed/

[Ototero]

Which of those is best for a Linux novice?

[AMDave]

In all cases you will find less support for x86_64 over x86, but it is improving greatly.

For the novice I'd give the Gutsy Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10 a go (I still have some dependency issues with current published packages for Hardy Heron - Ubuntu 8.04). I'm pretty confident that Ubuntu will work on that system though because it is Debian based. There is lots of support on the fora for Ubuntu as it's popularity is booming since Vista entered the market.

The CentOS (Community Enterprise operating System), which is basically RHEL with yum and de-branded, has good support forums. However, you may quickly find yourself at the command line. For a good solid system - this is my preference.

RHEL support has some strings attached.

Both CentOS and RHEL are FAST.

I don't have much experience with SLED or OpenSUSE because the continually have issues on my hardware selection and YasT eventually gets jammed up on package issues.

Fedora 7 would work well. 8 went a bit strange and 9 is still finding its way out of the woods even though it looks pretty sexy. I have to go back and check on that since they should have squashed some more bugs by now. I got some bad issues in the Gnome GUI when I loaded 9 a couple of weeks ago. I need some fresh ISOs.

All said, for you I'd recommend the x86_64 (AMD64) version of Ubuntu 7.10 for starters and a note to run the 32-bit web browser. But if you are game, Ubuntu 8.04 has lots of fixes in it and the package selection is rolled up better and ... well you can read all that for yourself. Everyone is (ed. loads of reviewers are) raving about it.

[vaughan]

Ubuntu 7.10 plays nice and is not too hard for the novice. As AMDave says there is lots of help on the Ubuntu forums.

Doomeva had me setup for a 64 bit version of Gentoo and it ran brilliantly with ABC at home. However, it was a right pain in the ar$e if you ever re-booted the 'puter to get it back and running BOINC again. It was very difficult to live with so I formatted that box and installed Win XP Pro 32 bit.

[AMDave]

Gentoo is definitely NOT for the linux novice.

[Ototero]

Oh well, I downloaded Ubuntu Server edition iso, burn it to a CD. I can see nothing on the CD. It I can't boot from it.

So much for that leaning curve.

[Frederic Brillouet]

Oh well, I downloaded Ubuntu Server edition iso, burn it to a CD. I can see nothing on the CD. It I can't boot from it.

So much for that leaning curve.

hahahahaha the learning curve just went through the earths core haha

[AMDave]

...I can see nothing on the CD...

Seems like a burn issue.
however, to make sure it all goes just right there are checksum that you can verify, etc.

Here's great page that will help you to ensure success.
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/iso

The benefit of a BitTorrent client for downloading isos is that it checks the integrity.
But I usually check the MD5 checksum before I burn anyway, to be sure.

[Brucifer]

A couple comments/thoughts... First off, on Ubuntu, you can trot down to the local store and pick up a copy of a linux mag complete with a DVD in it that will have Ubuntu, Suse, RH, or one of the main stream distrobutions, and you won't have to play the download and burn game and get frustrated as the dickens on top of hte learning curve.

Secondly as for whether you want to run 64 or 32, look at what project you want to crunch. IF you want to keep running dnet, then use a 64 bit one, if you aren't going to run dnet, then a 32 will do you fine.

If you want to keep crunching your moneybee, linux is the best thing to run it on, and 32-bit is fine too. And you don't have to get very involved and fancy. I'd be more than happy to help walk you through the moneybee thing if you want, or about any of the projects really. Shoot me a PM if you want.

Bruce