Recommended hardware and software for Linux "White" desktop hosts

When planning a new PC purchase for a "White" Linux host, please follow these guidelines as of December, 2000:

CPU: AMD Athlon 1 GHz or Pentium-III 933 MHz. Just ONE CPU per system please, at least until SMP support in the FreeS/WAN IPsec kernel patch set actually works properly.
Motherboard: The best Athlon MB on the market is the ASUS A7V, though we've also been using the FIC with success. We've heard rumors that the new Microstar K7T is a particularly good Athlon MB, though we haven't tested one; CTP is about to buy twelve, so we will update this page once we know the results. The Abit KT7-Raid Socket-A Athlon motherboard contains four embedded Ultra100 IDE controllers while the others listed only have two. This is perfect if in need of two or three IDE disks and a CDROM reader in the system; however we haven't tested the unit yet. Intel motherboards are generally best with Intel CPUs, though ASUS MBs are excellent as well. Avoid Tyan motherboards like the plague. Be careful about fans and cooling, because both the Pentium-IIIs and Athlons run pretty hot.
RAM: 256 MB of PC100/ECC CAS latency 2 or PC133/ECC CAS latency 3 RAM. ** PLEASE BUY ONLY ECC RAM!!! ** The non-ECC PC100/133 desktop stuff seems cheap, that is until you run a computational job and get back garbage results not any the wiser. ECC RAM will correct a single dead bit per word and report back to the kernel if more than one bit shows an error; in the event of a multiple bit error in a word you'll see the SYSLOG kernel notification "Dazed and Confused" reported back. As a scientist, you want to know when a core hardware component is generating bad results from your data; it's worth every dime.
Case/Power Supply: 300 Watt Power Supply, don't accept anything less. Make certain you've got reasonable cooling and consider a second fan in front of the case. These new machines run HOT! We've seen both Pentium-III and Athlon systems become unstable with improper power and/or cooling.
Disk: 30 GB IDE boot disk; no SCSI boot disks are supported. This is because of brain damaged PC design combined with the RedHat mechanism for including SCSI support as a loadable module within a preliminary RAMDISK image before mounting the root filesystem. What a mess. To be fair, RedHat really doesn't have a choice: many SCSI drivers are mutually exclusive when compiled in the kernel. For example, compile in the Buslogic BT and the Adaptec drivers in one kernel and watch your system crash on boot. CF wants to make certain we can automatically update kernels via a script without having to hand-tailor some subset of hosts every time we do so. The easiest and cheapest solution is to just use an IDE boot disk. IBM seems to be manufacturing the best IDE drives on the market; we're less than impressed by the reliability of Maxtor drives. Western Digital drives are OK. Pay close attention to the size of the on-board drive cache: 2 MB is fine, anything less is simply unnacceptable.
Secondary IDE disks: If you wish to purchase more than one IDE drive for data storage, please make certain that each drive, including the CDROM, is isolated on its own IDE controller. The IDE standard allows for up to two drives per controller, but at the cost of a significant performance loss. Many new Motherboards now support up to four IDE controllers instead of the previously more common two on-board controllers. If you plan on having two IDE disks and a third IDE CDROM drive, please consider the purchase of a motherboard with extra IDE controllers built in, or the purchase of a secondary IDE controller on a PCI IDE card.
UDMA Ultra66 and Ultra100: You'll need special short cables for the hardware to support Ultra66 and/or Ultra100, so large "server" cases are out of the question. However, kernel support is still experimental and not enabled on "White" hosts as yet since the code hasn't stabilized in the kernel. Expect that any near future support of this will be limited to specific IDE chipsets embedded on specific motherboards that CF has tested, but don't expect this to happen until after we roll out a new kernel release. Realize that Ultra66 and Ultra100 performance gains really occur only between the drive cache and the main system memory bus; the drive heads can't read much more than 30 MB/sec, even with the disc platters running at a high rotation speed. CF cannot recommend a motherboard and/or IDE chipset just yet, as we haven't performed the tests.
Video: Matrox G400 video with 32 or 16 MB on-board DDR RAM. This is the best 2D accelerator on the market; it's the only one that supports dual-head operation (two monitors, one desktop) on a single card (which will be supported in the next XFree release), as well as the only card on the market that supports hardware accelerated font/glyph anti-aliasing. Its 3D support is primitive, however. Previously we listed the G450 as a compatible card, unfortunately we were wrong. Please do NOT buy the G450 as it requires XFree86-4.0.x in order to run properly. Do NOT under any circumstances buy an NVIDIA GeForce based card as these aren't supported by the XFree release we include in the "White" standard system.
Video Capture: White-20010126-Desktop now supports certain USB devices, which (with a special kernel patch) includes the Phillips PCVC680k USB video camera. These can be had for about $100 bucks and should plug directly into your usb slot. If purchasing, CF personnel will have to configure the host upon which this will be used to load the correct kernel loadable module, please enter a WREQ Ticket and make a formal request.
Sound: ES1371 chipset based PCI sound card such as the Creative Ensoniq Audio PCI card. Don't buy anything else. If they tell you it already has "supported" sound on the Motherboard buy the Ensoniq anyway and disable the on-board sound support in the system BIOS. Every integrated motherboard sound chipset we've seen has had audio problems; the manufacturers often use cheap components and it shows. Especially don't buy any ISA based SoundBlaster clones or the original. Many systems don't even ship with ISA slots any longer, and getting sound cards to work with ISA PNP (Plug And Play) is a dice roll at best. PCI PNP actually works; RedHat 6.2 will automatically recognize the card and load the driver upon first booting.
Networking.: 3Com 3c95x, Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100, or DEC Tulip 2104x networking cards, preferred in that order. These are all good cards with a long history of functional drivers in the kernel.
CDROM Drives: Any standard IDE CDROM is perfectly fine. Please make certain it's connected to a separate IDE controller.
CDROM Burners: Please ONLY buy SCSI based CDROM Burners. The IDE SCSI emulation required to support IDE CDROM burners in Linux is a horrible, horrible, hack and simply doesn't work well. Additionally, you're far more likely to burn bad disks with an IDE burner because of limitations in the IDE standard. If you want to buy a CDROM burner, please make certain it's a SCSI burner with at least 4 MB of on-board cache to avoid extraneous buffer underruns while burning, which ruin the disk. Additionally, please follow our recommendations on which SCSI controller to purchase.

Optionally, if you wish to add a SCSI card for extra fast data disks, a CDROM burner, or a scanner please buy:

SCSI: Adaptec 29160 controller and at most two internal Ultra-LVD SCSI high perfornance disks. If in need of further disks, please purchase them as external units so as not to drain the system power supply, or overheat the case and components. The Adaptec 2930/2940 Ultra Wide controller is much cheaper than the 29160 Ultra-LVD and is suitable for single scanners or internal CDROM burners. If you are on a budget and not in need of high performance disks, then this is a perfectly adequate solution. Don't mix a CDROM Burner and Ultra-LVD disks in the same case with only a 300 Watt power supply. Please don't be frugal when buying expensive SCSI disks as the high rotation speed of these drives draws significant power from the system power supply; combine that with the high draw from a CD Burner and you're asking for trouble. You should note that combining an Ultra-LVD device with an older UltraWide device on the same SCSI chain will significantly reduce performance and throughput of the UltraLVD disk; if you want high performance SCSI disks and a CDROM burner on the same system, you're better off buying two controllers like the 2930 for the CDROM Burner and the 29160 for the high performance disk. The Adaptec 39160 supports two Ultra-LVD channels, but is highly expensive and really only appropriate for servers. Still, it's supported just fine by the same Adaptec kernel driver and as such is acceptable to CF. Do NOT buy an NCR or Symbios Logic based card as the drivers are a bit flakey. Also, some NCR cards simply aren't supported, period. The Adaptec card has a long history of support in the kernel and is guaranteed to work.

Without SCSI, as of December 2000, you should be able to pick up a box like this for about $1500. Once DDR ECC RAM becomes common we'll update this web page with new reccomendations.

RedHat provides a hardware compatibility list for RedHat 6.2, which may be of some use. However, CF staff want to make certain that readers understand that if they wish to buy from their preferred vendor that they absolutely purchase hardware we know will work. Your vendor's claims that his/her hardware is "supported by Linux, we promise!" notwithstanding, if you buy something else we can't promise any level of functionality. What do they mean by supported? Do they mean with a proprietary kernel loadable module provided by the vendor? Do they mean on their specific Linux release? Can they assure us it will work within our "White" desktop standard? Our hardware compatability list will absolutely work with our new "White" CF supported Linux release, mostly because it's the most common hardware on the market and we've had a chance to vet the hardware personally. You may purchase a system like this from Parasoft Computing (PSSC Labs) as well as PC's for Everyone Please make certain that the PC's For Everyone staff understands exactly what you want. They lost a 20 machine order from CF because their sales clerk wouldn't quote me a machine with ECC RAM, even after I suggested a different motherboard.

If you're looking at this page confused by all the buzzwords, but still have to purchase some Linux hosts for your group, CF recommends that you either:

Have the sales clerk from your preferred vendor read this page and then provide an itemized quote for CF to vet. The quote must contain an itemized list of every component in the system, or we won't be able to help.
Contact PSSC Labs and ask Janice Lessor to sell you some of our standard "White" machines. She'll know what you want.

Please recognize that CF currently supports two Linux Operating System platforms. "Green" hosts are the previous desktop standard based on RedHat 5.2 and are currently being phased out. Don't expect that a "Green" box can be installed on modern hardware, "Green" hosts are based on the older 2.0 kernel series which doesn't support much common hardware any longer. The replacement is a new "White" standard based on RedHat 6.2 with security updates and many popular commercial and free desktop applications. This is based on Kernel 2.2.16 and drives most modern hardware except for USB, which Linux doesn't yet officially support. Please see our Linux at LNS web page for further details.

Last modified: Jan-26-2001 by J. Maynard Gelinas