On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Vijai Ganapathy <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi All, > > > I am planning to buy 10 numbers of system for FOSS related free > education + lab setup. > Main purpose for buying these to enable students to work on FOSS ( > mainly Linux Admin and programming ) topics. > > Budget is really tight as all the money coming from my pocket. I was > thinking about below configuration. > > 1. AMD Athlon II X2 260 + Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2P + HDD + 4 GB Ram
You have not mentioned the number of students - assuming 10; Change this to Phenom II X6 (I am using 1075) with MAX RAM allowed by the system board with 2X1TB RAID1 setup. This can be your "server" Most AMD CPUs support SVM (Secure Virtual Machine) and so I suggest you give your student their own VMs with a 512MB RAM and 8 GB virtual disks and allow them to "brain damage" their system in their "sand box" e.g. cd /; rm -fr . You are in control of the "server" and the students are in control of their "VM desktop/server" You will only need one such "server" so the cost savings can be significant compared to full fledged desktop for every student. Additionally go with a Gb switch if budget allows - 16 port switches are in the 10-12K range. > or > > 2. Intel Atom D525 based system. > > Heard that Atom based system are not really facinating to work from > few users. Can someone throw light on this. My experience with Atom boards have been +ve. I have run 3-4 small VMs (LAMP + light desktops) in VBox on Atom boards. Heavy compilations not so good. Instead use D425 Atom based systems (Digisol) as thin clients i.e. without any disks. Board+RAM cost about Rs. 4250 or less. Look through the list archive - there was a similar discussion a few weeks ago. > Also need your suggestion on the HW config and keep in mind that my > budget is really tight. You get what you pay for. I suggest choose a good board, max. RAM and a CPU with multiple cores. HTH -- Arun Khan _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
