1.1. Purpose of this document
The purpose of this document is to give you the background
information you need to be a savvy buyer of Intel hardware for running
Unix. It is aimed especially at hackers and others with the technical
skills and confidence to go to the mail-order channel, but contains
plenty of useful advice for people buying store-front retail.
This document is maintained and periodically updated as a service to
the net by Eric S. Raymond, who began it for the very best self-interested
reason that he was in the market and didn't believe in plonking down
several grand without doing his homework first (no, I don't get paid for
this, though I have had a bunch of free software and hardware dumped on me
as a result of it!). Corrections, updates, and all pertinent information
are welcomed at esr@snark.thyrsus.com. The
editorial «we’ reflects the generous contributions of many
savvy Internetters.
If you email me questions that address gaps in the FAQ material,
you will probably get a reply that says "Sorry, everything I know
about this topic is in the HOWTO". If you find out the
answer to such a question, please share it with
me for the HOWTO, so everyone can benefit.
If you end up buying something based on information from this HOWTO,
please do yourself and the net a favor; make a point of telling the vendor
"The HOWTO sent me" or some equivalent. If we can show
vendors that this HOWTO influences a lot of purchasing decisions, we get
leverage to change some things that need changing.
Note that in December 1996 I published an introductory article on
building and tuning Linux systems summarizing much of the material in this
HOWTO. It's available
here. In 2001 I published an article on building the Ultimate Linux
Box.
This Buyer's Guide actually dates back to 1992, when it was known as
the "PC-Clone Unix Hardware Buyer's Guide"; this was before Linux
took over my world :-). Before that, portions of it were part of
a Unix Buyer's Guide that I maintained back in the 1980s on USENET.
It may be a matter of historical interest that the page count of this
guide peaked in mid-2001 and has been declining since. Video, sound, and
other functions are migrating onto motherboards. Several bus types have
disappeared, as have all the old-school backup technologies that couldn't
scale up to match disk capacities, Spec sheets are getting
simpler. Accordingly, there are parts that used to have whole sections to
hemselves that I barely even write about anymore —floppy disks and
keyboards, for example, are utterly generic now,
In retrospect, the success of the ATX standard for motherboards in
1998-1999 was probably the turning point. The PC industry has become
sufficiently commoditized that your choices are now getting simpler rather
than more complicated. This is a Good Thing.