Reference this post about praying for a computer upgrade: I received a promise of assistance in purchasing, to be paid back at a comfortable rate. This allows me to be just a little more aggressive about selecting something powerful enough to run like new three or four years down the road. I’m currently leaning toward building my own, perhaps something in a quad-core if I can get it cheaply enough. I have a couple of folks helping me look.
Right now, a major challenge is getting hardware with a video chipset which X.org can handle. Lots of current Radeon stuff is still not fully implemented, and I’m trying to avoid nVidia because they are so arrogant toward consumers, and refuse to cooperate much with Open Source. So far, only Intel chipsets seem to be fully covered among current offerings. Perhaps in a few days I’ll be able to report a purchase.
I would like to thank those praying with me on this.
Update: A donor came forward today who purchased a retail system for me, with the understanding I can pay them back later. I now own a Dell Inspiron i545. The specs include Intel Dual Core 2.7Ghz, 6GB RAM, and a 23″ LCD monitor. The Intel graphics chipset is quite recent, and I found the standard Xorg for CentOS was unlikely to support it properly, so I’m installing openSUSE 11.1 for now. Should it work as well as I hope, I’ll probably upgrade to 11.2 after the first rush of downloads has tapered off.
Historically, something about SUSE and the old RedHat was how the last incremental release in any series (X.2 or X.3) was always considerably better than the next series for quite some time. It appears this is no different, considering reviews from those who have kept track, and tested the pre-release for 11.2. At any rate, we have desktop, and I’m truly blessed.
