'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)

[Bill Mullen]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Rich Cloutier wrote:

> The fact of the matter is, all those programs are Windows based (or at
> least WERE until Linux.) And one kid I know actually complains that his
> P4 system can't play an audio CD, watch TV (ATI All-in-wonder) surf the
> web, and chat with his friends all at the same time. So he wants a
> faster computer. Not because he can't play games; his system is
> perfectly capable of that, but because when he does all that, his audio
> CD skips. And it's because the OS is not real time. How does the problem
> get solved? Throw more hardware at it. A true real time OS COULD indeed
> play that audio CD without skipping and do the other stuff too.

I have no idea if Linux qualifies as a "real time OS" or not, but as luck
would have it, as I read your post it occurred to me that I am doing
exactly these things at the moment (and, obviously, answering my mail as
well) on a system of lesser horsepower than that one (a PIII/667)! And my
CD isn't skipping, either. :)

I'm running Mandrake 8.2 (stock kernel 2.4.18-6mdk) on it, with 256M RAM,
3 small ATA/33 HDs, an IDE DVD-ROM drive, an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 AGP
card with 32M, a SoundBlaster Live X-Gamer 5.1 sound card, 2 10/100 NICs
(only one in use, though), a USR PCI voice modem, and 2 mice (a PS/2
corded three-button and a USB cordless trackball, both Logitech).

For software, it's MDK 8.2, Xfree86 4.2.0 with the Gatos project's ati.2
driver, kdm, Xfce WM, esd, Xawtv (using the tuner on the card, not either
external input), Gaim 0.59 (online w/ ICQ, Yahoo, and two AIM names),
Opera 6.02 (viewing pages running Java applets, Java is Sun's 1.4.0),
Gkrellm controlling XMMS (and playing from the DVD-ROM), and a couple of
gnome-terminal windows, one of which is an ssh session to my server box,
running Pine 4.44 from there. Oh, yeah, and Gkrellm is also keeping me
apprised of the current weather conditions at the airport down the street
from me, and I have the xplanetbg daemon (mentioned in a different thread)
redrawing my root window every five minutes.

All this going on, and the box isn't even breaking a sweat, much less 
skipping the audio:

moon at tvbox:~$ uptime
  6:08am  up 1 day, 15 min,  3 users,  load average: 0.22, 0.07, 0.02

"Real time" or not, it's a helluva "Real OS", and it makes excellent use
of every hardware configuration I've introduced it to so far.


Just my $0.02USD :)

-- 

Bill Mullen
6:17am, 2002-08-13