I built this computer for gaming. I spent many hours reading reviews and forums before deciding on the hardware. My budget didn’t allow for top of the line, bleeding edge components but I shopped around. What I ended up with was a fast stable rig that produced decent benchmarks. That was 2004 and the system is now starting to show its’ age. My purpose then is to extend the life of the current setup at least another year and continue to use it for gaming. The second and more important purpose is to test whether gaming with wine on Linux is a viable option. If I get good game performance then I have no reason to continue using Windows.
The Hardware:
Motherboard; DFI NFII Ultra Infinity Rev. A+. with nvidia nforce2 chipset.
Processor; AMD Athlon 2600+ w 512Kb cache
Memory; 1.5Gb Corsair DDR 400 memory
Video; Chaintech Geforce 6600 w 256 MB
Harddrives; Maxtor 60Gb and Western Digital 250Gb
The motherboard has serial ATA connections and I originally purchased a serial ATA hard drive for the system. At the time SATA was just reaching the consumer market and this board shows that all the bugs were not out of the system yet. I have managed to install Windows on the SATA drive but only after turning all system settings way down. Even then it was a hit and miss process that took many attempts. I have never been able to install a Linux distribution on the SATA drive. Most of them will recognize the drive and begin the install and then hang during the drive formatting stage. I don’t know how well current motherboards are handling SATA drives but mine is on the parts shelf waiting to find out.
In my last post I stated that I have been trying different Linux flavors for years. I currently have a stack of discs ranging from the old Mandrake 8 to the new Sabayon 3.26 and GoboLinux 013.
Sabayon is very pretty and seems to perform well. I installed and ran this for several days without any problems. The support community for Sabayon is still small though. This became very apparent as I started looking at installing wine and read through the forums.
GoboLinux appealed to me because of the way the tree is structured. This addressed one of the problems I have had learning my way around Linux. I had no problems with the install and all my hardware was recognized. I played with this distro for a few days as well and was leaning toward using it. As I got into the website and the forums I realized that GoboLinux is intended for a more experienced Linux user. Since I am still learning and am trying some things I haven’t done before I decided to leave this for future consideration.
The distribution I settled on is Kubuntu the KDE flavor of Ubuntu. I have been using Kubuntu fairly regularly since about ’04 or ’05 and really like this distribution. Kubuntu appeals to me on several levels. I really like the philosophy behind it, the support community is large and active, and package availability is great. The key selling point for this setup is the fact that WineHQ has instructions for installing and running wine on Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
Next post I will cover the install, setup and testing of Kubuntu, wine and world of warcraft.
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