[wellylug] Computer System Vendor Wgtn

Brent Wood pcreso at pcreso.com
Sat Apr 21 10:27:39 NZST 2007


--- Ian Beardslee <itb at falcons.co.nz> wrote:

> Ok to throw my thoughts in (trying to get the wording right to not
> create a 'vendor war')

> Silicon Systems in Petone is a good one ... they have supported our
> Linux InstallFest for the last few years.  Although to be honest I
> haven't actually used their 'whitebox' systems for linux myself.

Great hardware & support (but no AMD please :-), & I'm using Silicon boxes at
work as Linux desktop/workstations. I have found that Intel tend to tinker a
bit with things like IDE chipsets, & have had to use custom kernels to support
DMA, etc, but the boxes are very reliable & robust. One about 3yrs old &
'tother about 6 months. Intel also probably have the best "out of the box" open
source 3D graphics support, if not performance.

For my particular mix of applications however, I also have an AMD box which is
considerably faster used as a GIS/mapserver/db server, which is obviously not
from Silicon.

So there are sometimes Linux niggles, but Silicon will work hard to resolve
these, and even work with various LUG members to help out, so I agree with
Ian's comment that as a local vendor of quality hardware supporting local
Linux, it is well worth supporting them, just as they do us.


Brent




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