Best OS for dual 285's, 8-10G ram...

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I would like to do a lot of virtualization, some desktop tasks, code/development, and perhaps occasional gaming.

I need the following devices supported:
1) 37" westie
2) 20" dell 2000fp
3) 7800GT
4) 3ware 9550sx-8lp
5) 7800GT (MSI)
6) brother mfc-240c
7) various generic usb hubs
8) usb pen drives by various manufacturers.

I'm guessing fc6, ubuntu or freebsd is the best bet.

Thoughts?

I'm most comfortable in the bsd's (I'm pretty good at pf/carp/Qos stuff in openbsd and doing "advanced" stuff such as setting up & using memory filesystems for compiling, etc), but I've using linux at work too.
 
Ubuntu should work. Debian should work. FC[1-6] should work. Windows XP, 2003, or Vista should work*. *BSD should work. Pick whatever you like and are comfortable maintaining.

The printer may pose a bit of a problem. YMMV. Buy a hardware print server if it's an option; they're cheap.

* Pending driver support for vista64, of course.
 
What vitualization system?

If you want VMWare you'd have to track down VMware-2.x to use FreeBSD.
 
Yeah, I'm not a fan of windows licensing at all and don't really see it being better than the other options. I think it is pretty much out.

I do like vmware/latest which I currently run under windows, so I'm probably going to pick a linux 64-bit of some sort. Should be an interesting change I figure :)

I have fc6 on several boxes here, and I wonder how well vmware runs on it (haven't tried it). Anyone?

I imagine the most software is available under bsd, but linux has the vmware advantage. BSD arguably has the better license.

hmmm...
 
Robstar said:
I would like to do a lot of virtualization, some desktop tasks, code/development, and perhaps occasional gaming.

I need the following devices supported:
1) 37" westie
2) 20" dell 2000fp
3) 7800GT
4) 3ware 9550sx-8lp
5) 7800GT (MSI)
6) brother mfc-240c
7) various generic usb hubs
8) usb pen drives by various manufacturers.

I'm guessing fc6, ubuntu or freebsd is the best bet.

Thoughts?

I'm most comfortable in the bsd's (I'm pretty good at pf/carp/Qos stuff in openbsd and doing "advanced" stuff such as setting up & using memory filesystems for compiling, etc), but I've using linux at work too.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you might be more comfortable with Gentoo. I've been using it going on five years now having installed it three athlon-xp systems, a dual 246 system, and a dual 285 system. Well, actually the 285 system was just an upgrade and I built another dual 246 system with the old processors. Both those systems are compiled using march=amd64 -O2 and are very stable despite using the supposedly unstable ~amd64 option and x86 emulation is great for games. Portage, the package management system, was inspired by the bsd ports system so its almost like getting the best of both worlds.

My 285 system specs:

Tyan Thunder K8W mb
Two dual core opeteron 285s
8 gb Corsair Reg ram
Radeon X800Pro video card (I prefer open source drivers)
2 500gb and 4 250gb hard drives
Ali USB Controller (the K8W only has a USB 1) controller
Audigy Soundcard

I had to set the bios memory hole to "discrete" to get all my ram recognized by the kernel just in case you run into that problem.
 
EzInKy said:
Sounds like you might be more comfortable with Gentoo. I've been using it going on five years now having installed it three athlon-xp systems, a dual 246 system, and a dual 285 system. Well, actually the 285 system was just an upgrade and I built another dual 246 system with the old processors. Both those systems are compiled using march=amd64 -O2 and are very stable despite using the supposedly unstable ~amd64 option and x86 emulation is great for games. Portage, the package management system, was inspired by the bsd ports system so its almost like getting the best of both worlds.

My 285 system specs:

Tyan Thunder K8W mb
Two dual core opeteron 285s
8 gb Corsair Reg ram
Radeon X800Pro video card (I prefer open source drivers)
2 500gb and 4 250gb hard drives
Ali USB Controller (the K8W only has a USB 1) controller
Audigy Soundcard

I had to set the bios memory hole to "discrete" to get all my ram recognized by the kernel just in case you run into that problem.
Click to expand...

Wow this is almost identical to my box.

I have a gigabyte ga-2cewh, 4 * 2G (dual rank) dimms, dual 285's, 3ware 9550sx-8lp with 2 500G sata (WD) drives on it, a 7800GT and some usb hubs, usb printer..... Just looking for the OS :)

My sata drives are in in "3-in-2" hot swap carriers....4 bays open still. Maybe I will try gentoo & see how it flies
 
I tend to shy from Fedora because it's really fat and the project as a whole has gotten hideously disorganized.
 
FC6 does play well with VMWare, you just have to fudge the config script a bit since it gets very confused when looking for your kernel headers.

Admittedly it took me awhile to trim the fat off my FC5 install, but it's been running for nearly a year now, and I've just told yum to start using the FC6 repos, giving me a twisted hybrid. :)
 
After having gone through every Linux distro I could find I ended up with Suse 10.1 64, soon to be 10.2.

It’s solid, supports VM and has self repaired every horrible thing I’ve done to it. I have it on several dedicated machines at the moment and I run it in VM inside Vista Ultimate.

I’m by no means a Linux maven or guru but I can actually use this version and be productive. ;)
 
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