[sf-lug] Rick's explanation of his internet setup.

[Adrien Lamothe]

>(I note that you mean under WINE or WineX, etc.:  Half-Life is _not_ a
Linux application.  It's a DirectX Windows one.)  

I said "... game servers running Linux to host the game Half-Life." This sentence is probably unclear. It means the hardware is used to host the Half-Life game servers, not the clients. Half-Life servers are written for both Unix/Linux and Windows. The site uses the Linux versions.

>Running those more-typical applications in a native-Linux
>environment heightens that effect, in that Linux itself tends to be 
>much less CPU-intensive than are Microsoft's Win32 OSes.

That depends. KDE has gotten fairly heavy in recent years. GNOME, with a CORBA underpinning, is probably equally heavy.

>However, if you handed me the price of one of those machines and told
>me, "Rick, see if you can get better performance for native-Linux
>general-variety desktop or server usage, using the same amount of
>money", I'll guarantee I'd be able to _smoke_ your box -- in that
>radically different usage scenario.

Well, we were actually given a server by a corporate sponsor, as part of a special event, so price wasn't an issue. The box is an Athlon 64 with Serial ATA RAID. It is currently running Fedora Core.

>have found out the hard way that the proprietary drivers tend to become
>unusable as the kernel's interfaces change, or when you try to migrate 
>the hardware to a new box (ia32 to AMD64, say).

My SuSE distros have utilized standard stuff, unless specifically configured otherwise. SuSE has also done an excellent job of supporting AMD, both 32 and 64.)

>By "SUSE 9.3", I refer to the boxed-set edition that was (lawfully) 
>available on a per-seat licensed basis from retail vendors, which has
>much more proprietary code than the various redistributable editions --
>for the simple reason that many of those proprietary codebases lack any
>grant of a right of redistribution to the public.

If you read the SuSE 9.3 license, you will find that copying it and giving away those copies to others is allowed, as long as the copies are not given away for profit.

Cheers,

Adrien Lamothe



		
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