Hardware
Reccomend that only Red Hat Tier 2 or better supported hardware be used.
Supported hardware can be found at
http://www.redhat.com/support/hardware/
CPU
Currently, the best value for money Intel CPU is the 600 MHz
Pentium III.
Alternatively, a faster AMD Athlon CPU can be had for
less cost. However, there are no SMP (multi CPU) Athlon motherboards - so
Intel is the only possiblity for SMP systems.
Motherboard
ASUS P2B (single CPU) or ASUS P2B-D (dual CPU) (100 MHz FSB).
These are great motherboards. Previously we used Supermicro SMP motherboards
but had stability problems until we disabled APIC (more on that later).
Hard Disk Drive
IBM GXP Range (IDE/UDMA66). These are fast (7200 rpm), inexspensive and high
performance (512K or 2MB cache). Capacities up to 75 Gigabytes.
Ethernet Card
Inel PCI EtherExpressPro.
Video Card
Matrox G400. Under XFree86, Matrox video cards have consistently proved to
be a cut above the rest in terms of speed and image clarity. Matrox has
also given full details of their video cards to the XFree86 community.
Memory
256 MB of 100 MHz or 133 MHz SDRAM. Intel's RAMBUS technology is expensive
and only about 3% faster than 133 MHz SDRAM. The ASUS motherboard listed
above will only support 100MHz SDRAM. 133 MHz SDRAM is supported on an
increasing number of motherboards using an VIA chipset. So far, the
only SMP motherboard I know of that supports 133 MHz SDRAM is manufactured
by TYAN and is not yet available in the UK.
CD-ROM
Any fast IDE CD-ROM Drive will do.
SCSI
If you want a SCSI card, cards manufactured by Tekram (avilable from Scan,
http://www.scan.co.uk) are excellent.
They're also much cheaper than Adaptec SCSI cards.
CD Writers
Yamaha 4824 SCSI (4x CDRW, 8x CDR, 24x READ).
Monitor
Iiyama monitors are highly reccomended along with Sony and Mitsubishi. The
new "Flat Screen" models are very nice indeed.
Case
Reccomend a full tower ATX case. This allows plenty of room for adding
more hard disk drives.
Rodents
Logitech PS/2 Wheel mouse. Cherry Soft Click PS/2 Keyboard.
Soundcard
Soundblaster PCI 128. Available from Scan
(http://www.scan.co.uk) for only £15.
Avoid ISA Soundcards as there are bugs in the 2.2 kernal that can cause
your machine to freeze when using the DMA mode.