Faster Tux, kill, kill!
Hi. I have been buying your excellent magazine for some time, although much of it goes straight over my head (sorry Jolyon!). My current computer is just over 10-years old (Athlon 64 X2 with 2GB RAM and Ubuntu 14.10) and it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Seeing that LXF219 promised the ‘Fastest Linux PC’, I felt a new build coming on. However, although it is a great description of how to build a machine from scratch, I was disappointed that there is little discussion of the hardware or software. I waited until LXF220 to see if this was addressed, but no, it was not.
Can you give us some more on this subject? What compromises were made (processor, RAM, HDD spec and so on) and what do you recommend for housing the all-important Penguin? Should Linux go on the SSD or on the HDD? What about the swap partition?
This machine could be at the centre of a Newbie section, and I for one would be glad of a series of short articles aimed at those of us who, although not ignorant of PCs, are relatively new to Linux. John,viaemail Neil says: As you’ve spotted, the feature in LXF220 was to do with just building the hardware – the perception I have is that LXF readers aren’t as up to date with hardware as they are with software, so would prefer an insight into putting together a decent performance system for a reasonable price.
I think the real question you’re asking is about the available options for hard drive configurations when it comes to installing Linux. That’s a pretty big subject these days, as you point out – it ranges from a single spinning hard drive to RAID configs with multiple drives and all the new SSD/NVMe options, plus you could start taking into account modern filesystems running on top, which do their own software RAID and add another layer of complexity.
Something I was wanting to cover was the use of a cheap SSD to cache a large spinning disk (array). This is easy to set up and apparently works well. However, that then gets me thinking that perhaps we need to look at the whole subject area. We are going to look at ZFS again, too, in LXF227, which touches upon all this.
Now I have to think about how I can sell a filesystem cover feature to management...