Gregory Nowak writes: > > You could buy a bare bones computer > > for about the same price that you can buy the parts seperately. > > The problem with bear bones systems is that the bear bones parts can > be proprietary. Well, you will want to avoid the proprietary, of course. You'll want to know that what you're buying is directly supported by Linux. But, if you do that, you can get a much better system for about the same money. I did this year. Here's what I got about 5/6 months ago, and what I would tweak today ... Asus Pundit P3-PH5 bare bones -- Caso, power supply and socket 775 mobo, about $200 I paid $30 to significantly enhance the cpu fan with a Zerotherm PU Cooler I paid about $30 for a DVD/CDR burner. I paid around $240 for an Intel dual-core 6600 CPU, key factoid being the 4-Mb L2 cache. Very nice, but I'm already looking at swapping it for the $275 quad-core. I paid about $116 each for two 1Gb sticks of fast OCZ memory. I got a 500Gb 7200 RPM Western Digital SATA disk with 16Mb cache to use for file storage for about $110. So far, the above all came from Newegg. Lastly, I bought a couple of 10K RPM 36Gb SATA disks, also 16Mb cache, on Ebay for around $40 each. One of those two is the slash partition on this system I'm describing. Admittedly, this was a darn good price for this disk. This gave me a smoking fast system for around $900. It's also an extensible system. I can go up to 8Gb in RAM in four slots. And, as I said, I'm already looking at swapping the dual-core for a quadcore--same socket. Best of all, Fedora 7 just installed--over PXE no less. Yes, I needed to get sighted assistance to configure the bios to look for PXE on power up, and I accepted help installing the parts, because I'm not particularly good at that. Every device is natively recognized and properly supported by Fedora. It just works, and I love it. Can you buy a system for under $900? Yes, you can. Can you buy a system like this for less? Not today--unless you put it together from parts. Probably not for another year or so. Janina
