by Hi, all -
I'm re-working all my machines, shedding myself of some older machines
(386en) as I move in to split a house with my girlfriend, with only one
medium-sized bedroom for computers (instead of two, 1 at each of our
places, plus living room space at my place <G>), and now only needing
one home LAN, not two - I want to upgrade my Linux/Dos box for personal
use from several slow 486en to a single Pentium (or better!) - Need to
get a few "Real Life"things done, first, but -
I have 64 Mb SDRam (2 3v DIMMs) sitting here waiting for a momboard,
and a few HDs (WDAC34000 for one,) ready to put in the machine; an S3
765 {Trio64V+} or 864 PCI SVGA card (I can pick which, the other goes
into the Win95 box), a few Hitachi CDR-7730 ATAPI CD-Rom drives and a
couple NEC 7-CD SCSI changers, a Future Domain TMC-1680 ISA SCSI
controller (for now), a SMC 8216C ISA NIC, and a SCM PCMCIA Docking
adapter (ISA; May get a second, too). External USR Sportster 33.6
Modem. And a MediaVision Wavetable IDE CD-Rom sound card, or a MV
PAS/Sanyo H94A combo or a MV SCSI PAS sound card. And a bunch of huge
old SCSI-2 FH drives in external cases, that I may connect up. Plus
some smaller SCSI drives (for Swap, etc.) My home LAN is 10Base-2, and
I have
bunches of parts (some pretty obsolete. Anyone want a 256k PC XT with
an 11 Mb HD?)
I'm interested in an UDMA motherboard for speed, the obvious reason;
One store (specializes in Win95 mainly) has a nice special on a Jetway
Pentium UDMA motherboard (with the SIS all-in-one chipset.) This is
reasonably priced ($170 with a Cx 6x PR200 CPU, or equivalent) & would
be a really good step up from the old 486DX50 ISA box, but maybe
something better exists for my purposes? (I wish there was a Linux
mini-HowTo on choosing a motherboard, but I'd better shut up before I
volunteer <G>!) They have a different VX chipset momboard, as well. (I
buy from them a lot because they have technicians who're competent, and
no sales people - so if I cannot figure a machine out, I'll call them &
they can either tell me what's wrong, or fix it if I bring them the
machine, or tell me that that can't be done. Neat place.) Any problems
known with Linux with any of the newer K5's plugged into a newer
Pentium-class motherboard?
If I plug in the TMC-1680, the SCM PCMCIA dock, the SMC NIC, and the
sound card, I need at least 4 ISA slots; a space for another ISA card
would be nice. I'm told ASUS makes a pricey, 5-ISA slot, Pentium
momboard (with 3 PCI slots?) but I don't know the model number (Asus'
web site won't give me any model information, it just gives me a
"Product Information" header?! May be NetScape 4's problem, I'll go
back to 3 soon.)
I don't mind getting a PCI SCSI-3 Wide card (plan to, eventually) but
want to wait until after the move (My girlfriend's disabled, so guess
who
gets to pay for both of us to move?) - Can get a PCI NIC that should
be Linux compatible, for little $, if I only have 3 ISA slots, and
make things work out. And the PCMCIA dock CAN stay with the 486DX50 ISA
machine, I'd like it to be on a Linux machine, but that machine can stay
Slackware easily.
Up to now, all my Linux boxes have been "s*pieces" machines, older
and/or obsolete, slow machines, and it's just time to find a nice home
for those DIMMs & put it all together in one quicker package...
I'm thinking a 213 Mb (Maxtor 7213SY) SCSI drive for Linux swap space,
probably put WFW 3.11's swap partition on there too, and a couple EIDE
drives inside the case for User space, set up to boot Dos; put Linux in
one 540 Mb internal SCSI drive & put whatever needs more room out there
on the external (600 Mb & 1.3 Gb) SCSI-2 hard drives, for now, and I'll
have enough space easily. Leave the other big SCSI's running the news
and mail server <G>...
Mark Willis