On Sun, 2012-02-19 at 09:41 -0800, Alan Browning wrote: ... snip > What do people do for card/driver combinations?
I recently blew up a couple of my LinuxCNC PC's and and to rummage through my pile of old PC stuff in order to get LinuxCNC running in my office again. It seems at one time, LinuxCNC would run fine on a PIII machine, but now there seem to be problems with getting enough RAM installed on these machines. 384MB will work 512MB is better, anything over this doesn't seem to return much benefit. Buying RAM for an older motherboard can actually make the overall cost higher than a newer system. In trying to get a PIII machine going, I found that old DIMMs are single or double sided and are most often not interchangeable. My office machine is currently a KM400 with blown out USB and Network ports. It runs very well with 512MB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 6200 AGP card. I got a very nice P4 machine from Geeks last week: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS $55 and free shipping. It's an FIC 845GV: http://www.fic.com.tw/product/motherboard/intel/P4I-845GV.aspx I'd really like to get a modern board, so I can play with dual cores and PCIe, maybe some day. If you are doing a LiveCD install, some CD or DVD drives don't work well. There doesn't seem to be any way to tell which drives will work. Sometimes the CD won't read, sometimes the install will finish but the installation won't run. Most times everything goes through just fine. A USB thumb drive can be used for installing, but older motherboards are likely to not support it. I recall unetbootin: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ or usb-creator-gtk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Live_USB_creator are needed to make the USB drive. Monitors and video drivers can be a real bugger. I tried to use a very nice CRT with separate RGB inputs, but this monitor did not have the feature that can tell Xorg what the monitor settings should be. Trying to manually set these parameters can be next to impossible without a PhD in Xorg. It seems the generic vesa driver can fix latency and give reasonable resolution. Contrary, to older wisdom, the proprietary Nvidia driver worked best for one of my machines. Using reasonably new mainstream hardware should "just work" without too much fuss. -- Kirk Wallace http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html California, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
