On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 20:52, Patrick Dunford wrote:I don't know much about the services provided by Ascent, except that they sell customisable PCs, including (according to their website) your choice of OS - Linux distro from the ones that they sell (Caldera, Mandrake, Turbolinux, Suse, Xandros, Redhat). So I presume they preinstall a Linux distro, but haven't enquired further.
Yuri de Groot wrote:
BTW his PC is an Acer bought from DSE, the most linuxAlready asked this and no replies, so I'll try to get the ball rolling a
friendly computer retailer in NZ.
little. I bought two Realtek NICs from DSE, because they are included
with drivers for Linux. As it happens, Debian comes with enough drivers
to run the cards, so I didn't have to compile the drivers that came with
them.
In those cases the best thing about having the driver on a disk from DSE is that you know what driver to use. Often your distro will have a more up to date compiled driver, but at least you know what to look for :-)
Also there is the laptop without an OS. Do they also sell desktops
without OS?
not at present I think. But they have plans to if the OS-less laptop sells ok. Shame the laptop is a little deficient, it may skew the results.
What other product range would qualify?
Not sure what u are asking Patrick.
Some of the stuff that they do sell is in a limited range. Ascent in
Wellington will sell you a complete system without an OS, they have a
wider product range with more choice of brands, and very competitive
pricing.
DSE are pretty good on linux support. They activley support linux, source drivers, test them, adapt them till they work etc. They put together a lot of rebranded OEM stuff, so they get a chance to pick and choose, and to test.
Chris Day from DSE is on the nzlug list, I suggested to him recently that they include the output of lspci for their systems on their webpage. He thought that sounded good and says he will implement it. In this way people can see exactly what chipsets and so on are in the boxes.
Will Ascent provide a similar service?
The new systems I took a look at the specs of were the Shuttle XPC system which is a box suitable for home use - probably too limited for high end power users in its configurability, but very reasonably priced as they start from $470 or thereabouts with the buyer adding their choice of CPU, HDD, memory and OS as they please. As it happens the PC Builder website appears to give full choices of all the options in the more conventional systems.
