I'm building a new computer, mostly from parts that I
have been given: The mainboard is an Asus E45M1-M Pro, which
has an AMD E-450 APU soldered to it.  Initially it will have
a single 4G DIMM, leaving an empty DIMM socket. The computer
will use a mirrored pair of 500G SATA hard disk drives.  All
of this will be in an mATX mini-tower case.

    For the operating system I will probably try an Illumos
distribution such as OmniOS or OpenIndiana.  I have an older
PC that I can keep for BSD use.

20 responses total.

    I'm told that BSD doesn't work well on today's AMD chips
and that Illumos is likely to suffer similarly (something to
do with AMD not releasing documentation). I have an older PC
that will work for NetBSD but it looks as though I may have
finally reached the point where I move to Linux for my
primary desktop OS.

I'm running FreeBSD on an AMD system just fine.  It's a few years old
(has its own graphics on board but not as part of the CPU), so depends
on what you mean by "today's AMD chips" I guess.  That APU junk is
probably what's doing it.  Hopefully, there will be some fixes for those
at some point, either in the OSes or the AMD chips.  

Unless MS comes out with a reasonable OS in the future, Win 7 will
probably be the tipping point for getting a different desktop OS.  I've
got Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) in a virtual machine and it's pretty
reasonable in either desktop setup.  I don't know if that's the best
way to go or not.   

    The ones I've been struggling with had E-350 and E-450
"Zacate" APUs, so you are probably right.  It would be
interesting to try one of their single-socket Opteron chips
but I'm not in a position to build a whole new system just
to try that out.

    My daughter ran Qimo (a Xubuntu derivative for children)
and then Xubuntu itself on her dual-core Atom desktop.  That
worked surprisingly well.  Perhaps I can set her up with one
of the Zacate boxes and build a new NetBSD box around her
Atom board.

    I didn't have to wait for my daughter to free up her
dual-core Atom 330 board.  I remembered that I had a single-
core Atom 230 board on the shelf and found the parts I would
need to cobble together a 64-bit desktop.  I replaced the
40mm north bridge cooling fan but its wires wouldn't quite
reach the header so I had to snip the connector off and
solder an extension wire on there.  Once that was done I
screwed it into an InWin D500 desktop case that had recently
been retired from service, found a 320 Gbyte SATA drive and
installed NetBSD/amd64. The computer has a DVD-RAM drive and
1 Gbyte RAM, though I may upgrade that if I find a 2 Gbyte
DIMM sitting around.

What do you plan to do with your new superfast desktop computer?

    This is far from "superfast". To give you some idea, the
processor a bit slower than the (32-bit) Athlon XP 2800+ in
my main desktop PC and about one tenth the speed of today's
$50 Haswell Celeron chip. That's just in terms of raw number
crunching.  Haswell offers much more memory bandwidth too.

    That said, the Atom box is fast enough to be useful
given efficient software, burns very little power and cost
nothing but my time to build (I literally had the parts
laying around).  Its first job will be to let me erase some
tape cartridges and consolidate data from a few old hard
disks before I drop those off at the electronics recycling
place.

    I've used the Atom box to test some hard disks (mostly
SATA but also one SCSI disk that turned out to be quite
broken). I also hooked up a very old tape drive and erased a
cartridge that had been sculling around the office.

    I took the single-core Atom box to work, where I use it
as a fixture to test hard disks, mostly 2.5" SATA models. My
daughter has Ubuntu on a Compaq desktop PC that my friend
gave us.  It has an AMD E350 "Zacate" chip and works
surprisingly well.

    Apparently I've inherited another AMD machine, this time
a quad-core Phenom II desktop. I may put it in a new case to
ensure good airflow over the drive array, which will be a
mirrored pair of 1 Tbyte WD Red disks.

Have you found that an OS like Ubuntu works well for
people used to Windows?

    Depends on the distro. When my wife's Windows XP desktop
failed I replaced it with my daughter's Xubuntu PC.  I was
pleasantly surprised that my wife was able pretty much to
pick up where she left off, in part because most of the same
applications were installed (Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice...)
on both machines.

    Later, when I put Ubuntu in front of her my wife's
reaction (after using it for about a week) was "I don't know
what this is but I hate it".

    People at the office have one icon in the middle of the
screen that gives them a full-screen Windows desktop running
on a server. They don't really use Linux or BSD even if that
is on their PC.

I feel sorry for the people at your office.  
 
I kind of figured if you had a browser you were used to and a office
application suite that would work for what you do, then most people
would be okay.  But they really get hung up on looks, quite often (this
doesn't look like Windows, so I hate it).  I know people who get their
e-mail via the web every day, so all they really need is a browser.

There may be good reasons to hate a Linux desktop if you can't get your
tasks done as easily or at all, or if the learning curve is too much
relative to the perceived gain. Anyway, when people have choices they
tend to lock in on one preference and not worry so much about whether
or not they can get their usual tasks done just as well in a different
system.  

    Depends on the organisation in question.  I'm very lucky
in that I'm allowed a NetBSD desktop at both of my jobs and
we have a production NetBSD server at one of them.  In many
businesses Linux, BSD and perhaps MacOS X would be forbidden
because they don't fit in with procedures, licensing schemes
or management tools that are already in place ...or just
because people in key positions aren't familiar with unix or
have heard horror stories about it.

Yeah, I hear you.  That's great you get a NetBSD desktop!  

my 10 year old neighbor has been giving
most of his friends and now their kid
brothers puppy linux computers. my stash
of laptops with bad kbds or sound is down
to two.  onscreen kbd usb sound.  problem
with the last two is no pcmcia slot and
they need wifi.  got three $2 dongles on
ebay that will not work on p3s even in
xp.  the driver crashes xp or linux.
said to be unstable in linux on a 64 bit
system.  rtl8188eu or su.  seller keeps
sending more drivers.  any other cheap
cards known good for linux if not for p3?
i have a 2008 netbook to share.  wifi
also died with the keyboard.

one kid does not want linux. microxp does
not do wifi.  may try zorin.  it would
not install for us but a friend knows
how.  said to look like windows.  the kid
has 4gb ram 160 gb hd.  my neighbor
wanted to try win98 or 2k.  

    I have an inexpensive Realtek USB WiFi adaptor on one of
the laptops at the office.  I'll try to get back there
tomorrow to look up the chipset.

    The kid with 4G RAM and 160G disk could probably run MS
Windows 10, depending on his or her processor.

The kid with the free computer does not have several hundred dollars to give
Microsoft.  The USB wifi dongle has two problems - it crashes older hardware
(Pentium III - which is faster than most of the laptops I gave away) and it
would not work at all for me with linux and was unstable for someone else with
linux.

    My E-450 "Zacate" box has finally been pressed into
service. I pulled an 80G SATA drive off the shelf, installed
NetBSD/amd64 6.1.5 from a USB flash stick and hooked it up
to the television in the family room.  The machine is
currently rescuing files from a disk that I pulled from my
NetBSD/i386 desktop, which suffered a hardware failure.  I
like the white InWin Z589T case it's in but I do wish it had
a proper drive cage.

    I should revisit that old E450 box one more time before
it gets recycled.  It would run for a few days or weeks and
then suddenly fail to boot from the disk or SSD.  I'll check
the CMOS battery and might try a different PSU.

I've got an old Dell Poweredge T105 here that started flaking out,
not booting, etc.  With a lot of effort and retries I could get it
to boot (FreeBSD).  Finally replaced the battery and it's been
fine ever since.  I've had to replace PSUs in other computers before,
too. They do go bad after X years.  Good luck!

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