[conspire] Re: Box needed for open source demo ; -> (was: box needed for FLOSS demo)

Tue May 3 23:11:41 PDT 2005

Well, you could build a nice box for about $250.

Let's see:

MSI Nvidia2 Socket A motherboard with high quality onboard video & 
sound, $46:
http://3btech.net/msik733atmow.html

Retail (with fan) AMD Sempron 2300+ CPU (333 MHz), $62:
http://www.chiefvalue.com/app/productdetails.asp?submit=property&item=19-104-209

Maxtor 80 GB 7200 RPM IDE hard drive, $40 (no rebate) at CompUSA,
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=40&threadid=1581527&enterthread=y

512 MB of Samsung PC3200 DDR (at Robert Austen Computer show),
$38  (you can find it at the big boxes for $35 after MIR).

Case with 300 watt PS: $20 at Fry's.
 http://www.netaffilia.com/ad/electronics/frys/i/2005/04/29/10110.html
(I'd advocate spending 2x-3x this and getting a nice power supply).

52xCDRW/DVD for $35 at Fry's:
http://www.netaffilia.com/ad/electronics/frys/i/2005/04/29/10080.html

These are decent but not particularly great deals and don't require mail 
in rebates.  They also change from day to day, so would require a little 
updating.

Occasionally Fry's will have a good price on a motherboard/CPU combo 
that will shave the price a bit (say $50), if you don't mind using an 
ECS/PCCHIPS motherboard and taking a hit in video quality and maybe 
shave CPU speed (I've seen KM266 mobos with onboard video and Sempr0n 
2200+ chips for ~$60).  Besides, what do you need good video for?  
Demoing Tuxracer?

With a rebate or two you can often get a 160 GB drive for $50 if you 
want to store a bunch of ISOs. 

You can upgrade to a nice NEC 16x dual layer DVD-Burner for another $15, 
also without rebate:
http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827152035&ATT=CD+DVD+Burners+RW+Dr&CMP=OTC-pr1c3grabb3r

For demonstration purposes, mobility is a plus, so I'd get a SSF (small 
form-factor) rig, which would kick up the price about $100. 
http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16856115014
($162 + $6 S&H - $20+ for crummy case and $46 for motherboard). 

Of course, none of this stuff is scuzzy enough for the likes of Rick, 
but with the exception of the cheesy Fry's case and BTC burner/DVD, most 
of this equipment is better than what you'd find in a typical OEM system 
(like Dell). 

All that said, as I mentioned a week or two ago, I volunteer with a 
group that takes donated hardware and sends it to Cuba to be used by 
doctors.  The government limits us to a maximum CPU speed of about 266 
MHz and we get a number of donations of corporate servers, e.g. dual 
Pentium III 866 chips or Xeon 800 MHz rigs, even a PIV 1.5 GHz with a 
gig of RDRAM.  It seems unlikely that the government will grant us a 
license to export this stuff before it decomposes, so we could probably 
work out a long-term loan for a worthy project, if you wanted to come to 
Oakland to pick it up (I'd have to run it by the rest of the 
organization, but I don't think there'd be a problem). 

Hell, if you wanted to invest a couple of Saturdays of 'sweat equity' in 
our good works, we'd probably even give you one of these PIII 800 boxes 
with a half gig of RAM.  You'd be amazed how many neighborhood kids who 
think they deserve a nice Windows box "to do homework" haven't taken me 
up on that offer.

Heck, I even installed BLAG 3000 (basically a Gnome version of Fedora 
Core 3, with better multimedia support and a lot of streaming multimedia 
stuff, etc.) on a few of the boxes last weekend, just for the hell of 
it.  It wasn't any work, just change the BIOS to boot from the CDROM and 
type in 'blagblagblag' at a prompt and the CD repartitions the drive and 
installs everything.  Then you have to enter a root password and set up 
a user account and you are done.  Kind of nice, since these ex-corporate 
boxes are sometimes a pain to FDISK, having a range of unfamiliar (to 
me) partition types (generally proprietary Unix, despite having little 
labels with Windows NT and 2000 licenses on the case panels).

Unfortunately, even if we got a license to send these boxes, we couldn't 
include BLAG, or any other full Linux distro on them, since, despite 
being OSS, they have encryption, etc.  I'm sure these prohibitions are 
completely effective in keeping the Cubans from acquiring this 
technology.  In an aside, strangely, I understand that Microsoft can now 
export expensive proprietary software to Iraq, but you can't send an 
Iraqi teacher a free Linux CD.
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63638-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/7318/print

Solidarity whenever,

Ed

On Monday 02 May 2005 09:46 pm, David Hartley wrote:
 > hmm...  I must be underpricing my hardware sales <g>
 > I just sold 3 new Athlon-64 boxes w/512MB & 80GB for $500ea.
 > While I don't have much in the way of stuff to give away, I could make
 > available a  P3 1.2Ghz/512MB/80GB at around $300, or less if someone
 > already had a hard-drive, or 512mb of PC133 SDRAM, etc.
 >
 > best,
 > www.davidhartley.com
 >
 > On 5/2/2005 8:30:35 PM, Rick Moen (rick at linuxmafia.com) wrote:
 > > I wish you luck on getting for free a unit with >1GHz CPU and 512MB 
RAM:
 > > A quick check on eBay suggests such machines now tend to run around 
$500
 > > used, so it would probably have to be someone who either has money to
 > > burn or really, really likes you.  ;->
 >
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