Opinion on best system to run Linux 7238

I had that problem a couple of years ago. I looked around and did not like any of them. So I buttembled my own from parts. Now I intended to run XP Home (which is too stupid to run both CPUs in that machine, but good enough for Quicken and TurboTax).

I was going to tell you about the dual processors, 6 hard drives, etc., in there, but your idea of very good performance and mine may be quite different. So what I did may not suit you. The best way to "design" a new computer is to istrument your existing computer, find out where the bottlenecks are, and ensure that the new machine has wider bottlenecks.

For my machine, I was very sensitive to hard drive seek times, so I put in 6 smaller hard drives instead of one giant one. And four of them are 10,000rpm Ultra-320 SCSI ones (the other two are 7,200rpm EIDE-100s, scheduled for replacement with SCSI ones when the money tree blooms). Also lotsa memory to preclude paging and allow large caches in the dbms.

What is that supposed to mean? What Red Hat distribution did you try to install? They are not making the usual "retail" versions anymore, so all the "Red Hat Linux" stuff out there is obsolete and unsupported. The stuff they support is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and if you get that, they will help you on their web site or over the telephone.

Could you not install it? If not, why not? What were the error messages? What other symptoms of not working were displayed?

Or could you not configure it correctly? What symptoms did you experience after the system was properly configured (or configured as well as you could)?

Or did it not work as you expected? What did you expect?

I got fed up with Windows 95 by early 1998, and switched to Red Hat Linux 5.0 at that time. It was so much better than Windows that I wondered (and still do, to this day) how Microsoft can sell software at least 15 years behind the times.

But until we know where the bottlenecks are, and how much you are willing to pay to get around them, I do not see how anyone can advise you.

BTW, I have never saved money by building my own. OTOH, I do get to put in quality components, do not put in stuff I do not need, and know what is in there, why it is in there, where it is in there, and so on. So if it quits, I can fix it.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 21:05:00 up 24 days, 7:36, 5 users, load average: 4.16, 4.24, 4.21