[svlug] installfest oops

[George Bonser]

On Sun, 25 Oct 1998, Rick Moen wrote:

> > 	- get the ethernet cards that has the DEC/tulip chip on it
> 
> Fewer available every day.  Compaq appears to have swallowed the entire
> production line.  Comme d'habitude.

Central Computer at Stevens Creek and Saratoga has a load of them. Marked
down from $85 to $75. These are the SMC 10/100 cards. The only problem I
have had with these cards are that they MUST go into a bus-master PCI slot
and it must be able to get INTA on the PCI bus. I have had some computers
that simply will NOT work with these cards (has only two bus-master PCI
slots and both are in use).

The next-best, in my experiance, are the Intel EEPro. These work without
bus-master though I would have to wonder how well on a 100Mbps net. 

I have heard good reports on the Bay Networks NetGear cards that also use
the tulip driver. THey are about half the price.

> Suggestion:  When we see people coming in with desktop machines having
> 400 MB hard drives, as I seem to recall this guy having, we should
> firmly point out that they're at a Robert Austin Computer Show, land of
> $110 4.3 GB hard drives.  Help a user shoehorn Linux onto an avoidably
> tiny system, and he's going to be disappointed with the "product".
> This outcome is not in our interest.

Just as an aside, I got one of those Net Desktop boxes that Linux Systems
Labs is selling for around $550 last week (got three of them, actually)
with Debian pre-installed. It came using 80Mb of disk. After I installed
some goodies (X, kernel source and stuff) it is now at 110MB used on a 2G
drive.  Huge drives are not needed if: Linux is the only OS and you are
not moving news.

BTW, these boxes are a Cyrix 6x86MX-200 with NON BUS-MASTERING PCI SLOTS
(arrrrgh) and 32MB of RAM. Had to trade the SMC ethernet cards for Intels.
Nice little boxes for VPN's though. I use CIPE.



George Bonser

The Linux "We're never going out of business" sale at an FTP site near you!


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