On Apr 3,  2:22am, Nathan Saper wrote:

> OK, here's the deal: I'm gonna buy a workstation for general use (serving
> up web pages, surfing the 'Net, apps development, etc.), and I'd love some
> suggestions.  Right now, I'm heavily leaning towards a Sun Ultra 5, but
> I'm not sure if I should leave good ole' X86.  I made one recent journey
> out of PC land with my NeXTStation, and it turned out to be less than I
> expected.  Of course, it is a pretty old machine...

Stay with linux/x86.  You'll have to spend a lot more to get a Sun
with comparable performance.  When I was working for Metrowerks and we
began porting our code to linux, we were pleasantly surprised to find
that our build times halved (or better) on our (much cheaper) linux
boxes as compared to our Sun boxes.  In fact, the difference was so
remarkable that we considered building cross compilers so that we
could do our solaris/sparc builds on linux/86.

> I'm trying to keep the price fairly reasonable (below 5 grand if at all
> possible), but I still want something that will be very useful for a long
> time.  Any thoughts?

Take a look at Dell, Penguin Computing, VA Linux, and TheLinuxStore.com.
They all sell systems with Linux preinstalled.  Also, you can be sure that
the hardware will support Linux well.

Don't skimp on memory.  Get at least 256MB; 512MB or 1GB will be even better.
(For $5K, you can easily afford it.)

Don't buy your monitor from the same company that sold you the rest of
your system.  You'll just pay more for a lesser quality monitor. 
Instead, pick out a monitor that you like and buy from a place like
buy.com.  (In fact, you may wish to employ the same strategy with
memory purchases as well.)

> P.S. It must support both 10BaseT (for connecting to my NeXTStation) and
> 100BaseT (for connecting to my laptop and my network), and PC printer
> support would be a plus.

Just get a 10/100 Mbps hub or switch.

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Buettner
kev@primenet.com, kevinb@redhat.com