Hello folks!
It's been a bit more than 2 years since I have Serenity - an AMD Athlon machine. And it's time to grow further. So I've made my research, and I got planned a machine that will serve me for my modest needs for another 2-3 years.
As prices plummeted seriously lately, and since dollar is not what is used to be, I can get pretty decent machine for a buck. I don't play games, my main needs are VM running (even couple of machines at the same time), Photoshop/Gimp rendering (for pics like these). Here's my configuration of choice that I'm thinking to have:
CPU: Intel Q9300
Motherboard: I'd like to have an Abit IP35 Pro, but its availability seems limited in my locale. So I'd be happy for other suggestions.
Memory: Mushkin or Corsair, 4Gb, CL4
Graphics: any NVidia 256Mb PCIe will do.
HD: 7200rpm, 250Gb or any other that gives good price/size ratio.
DVD burner: we have LG's and NECs laying around here for ~$30, so its easy.
PSU: Zalman, Thermaltake or Antec. These are the decent ones we have in local market.
Case: something simple, but that can sustain my system
Please let me know what do you think about it, and I'd love an MB suggestion that plays nicely with Linux. My main intention is to run Xen or other VM, and run Linux and Window under it.
Another thing that some folks may not understand, is my attention to run it with Ubuntu. To tell you the truth, I'm still the Gentoo person, but it takes increasingly more and more time to just maintain my Gentoo-based Serenity, and its only updates. My rsync doesn't work, updates are slow and I got many errors while updating a lot, which requires an attention as it renders system unusable.
I understand that those may be very easy to fix, but as I've said - I don't have time to deal with it as I had before, so I'm going to try my luck with customized Ubuntu for a while. Besides, I like learning new things, with Gentoo I feel like I don't know what's up there. And I've always wanted to learn Ubuntu.
Gentoo star seems to have eclipsed lately, I think I might get to fixing it when I have time later on...
Cheers.
