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 Ł15. Avoid ISA Soundcards as there are bugs in the 2.2 kernal that can cause your machine to freeze when using the DMA mode.