Anyone here running Linux on dual core CPUs 2000

On Sun, 06 Aug 2006 04:51:16 -0700, composlinuxmisc

Bad choice of CPUs. The P4 architecture was dreadful, Intel has just poo-canned it. You want a new Core2 Duo system, it's a vast improvement over the old P4 architecture. From your choice of P4s it sounds like you are looking for a low end system, in which case you can choose between the bottom of the Core2 Duo line, 6300, or from the Athlon 64 X2 line. AMD has reduced their prices to match the price-performance of the new Intel Core2 Duos. The AMD systems are still very good and they have the virtue of being mature and more readily available. For an AMD system I'd recommend you get a motherboard with an Nvidia Nforce chipset, they are very well supported under Linux and have excellent performance. I've been using MSI boards in my systems.

As for Linux handling multiple cores, it does that very well. Process scheduling is handled by the OS, the user doesn't need to do anything.

By definition single threaded programs can only use one core, however you can run multiple instances of them. Mulbreasthreaded programs will take advantage of the multiple cores. There are plenty of tools available for writing parallel programs on Linux, most of the worlds mbuttively parallel supercomputers run Linux, the remaining run some variant of Unix and use the same tools.