DPRG mailing list archives: [DPRG] PC 2700 DDR ram?

Tue Jun 10 11:29:46 CDT 2008

> From: ed at okerson.com
> My opinion is that dual boot machines are less useful than single boot
> machines.  It usually only serves the purpose of chopping up the
> partitions to unusable sizes for any of the operating systems installed on
> the machine.  Perhaps we can sell two of the XP licenses to pay for the
> RAM, then have two dedicated Linux machines and two Windoze machines.  Or
> even better, sell all the XP licenses and install Linux on all 4 machines
> with more memory (paid for by the XP license sales).

Ed,

Here is the rub:  several chip platforms have free IDE's, but they are
for Windows
only.  Parallax has a large library of Windows software, as does T.I.
Since these
machines shouldn't be full of high definition media downloads, I don't see 40 gb
as a particularly limiting platter size.  I could easily make them XP
only, but then
Steve would feel the irresistible urge to replace with the Linux of
his choice =).

I like the idea of having identical workstations, so if one is
"occupied", it doesn't
prevent someone from working on their project on a club provided relatively fast
computer.  The spare HD platter would be for a quick "dd" restore in
case someone
really messed up an installation, etc.  There is only 3 of these
machines, not four,
I apologize if I didn't make that clear.

Most Linux is free, and I am all for exposing members to alternate
operating systems
(BeOS, FreeDOS, Linux of all sorts), but if several toolsets are for
Windows only, and
we have legitimate stickers on all 3 boxes, I guess I am asking how
much space does
one really need for a linux distro?

There are several "live cd" images that seem to do pretty much everything.  The
"shared" fat32 partition could double as both /usr as well as
"%USER%".  Right now
we have multiple "boxen" that nobody wants to use because they are
slow.  There are
at least three Linux pentium 2's that I don't see anyone using.  I do
see the two current
Windows xp machines being used (my old sempron 3000 and the machine
Drew donated)

The Sempron is using roughly 7 gb iirc for its Windows installation
with a copy of all
the Windows IDE's I could find (AVR, T.I., parallax).  It also should
have all the current
media codecs should users want to watch the latest videos of some
robot activities.