[Gllug] Desktops with preinstalled linux

[Nix]

On 21 Nov 2009, Michael Stevens outgrape:
> http://www.dnuk.com/homepage.php used to be good. I haven't bought
> from them in a while though.

I refreshed all my machines from them earlier this year. As long as
you're careful to get ATI video cards their stuff is excellent: no
complaints at all, except about the courier company, who, er, 'lost' the
server (as in it reached the warehouse and then evaporated: losing a box
this large takes talent. Apparently the lorry and driver also could not
be located: a matter for the police, I suspect). So they sent me another
one.

They do recommend nvidia all over the place but it's easy to avoid it
(nvidia avoidance is probably a reflex in anyone posting here).

(The desktop I bought had an ATI HD4870 in it. I'm happy to say that as
of a month or so this has perfectly good 3D support and acceleration, as
long as you use KMS. It's still slightly slowish and artifact-prone 3D
support, and shaders aren't supported yet, this will come in time. You
do need bleeding-edge video drivers, libdrm and 7.6-branch Mesa, but
this is normal enough for KMS anyway.)

Everything significant non-3D works perfectly, the first machines I've
ever had that I can say that of. The only subsystems I have problems
with are the EDAC for the server's ECCRAM (Core i7/Nehalem EDAC isn't
supported by upstream kernels yet, though Mauro Chehab maintains a git
tree with support in it, which should get upstream in time), and IPMI in
the server, which is a crashy pile of shit requiring hard power removal
to restore, so tends to be nonresponsive more often than not. In this it
is no different from IPMI on any other system I've ever used. (Sun did
this right decades ago. Why can't Intel?)
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