[CentOS] CentOS 6 SFF motherboard or complete system

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Glenn Eychaner wrote:
> 	I am trying to assemble or purchase a set of CentOS 6 compatible SFF
> workstations, and am finding it incredibly frustrating to do so.
> hardware.redhat.com is so slow as to be useless and provides almost no
> information about each of the 1,300 or so products listed in their
> database; clicking through them one at a time is incredibly frustrating
> (and about half of them are discontinued or out of stock when I actually
> go looking for them, like the Intel DQ series motherboards I was
> interested in).  Vendor web sites are almost no use; they trumpet their
> Windows 8 compatibility all over the site, but finding information about
> Linux compatibility is next to impossible.
> 	My requirements aren't overwhelming; an i7 processor, four memeory slots
> preferred, dual 24" (1920x1200) monitor capability, and dual ethernet (or
> an expansion slot for a second Ethernet card).
> 	Anyone have any advice on how to attack this these days? I've been out of
> the hardware-purchase game on the Linux side for years, and most of my
> bookmarks no longer point anywhere useful, sadly.

Well, I have no idea was SFF is an acronym for, other than Science Fiction
and Fantasy, but I see from your sig that you're doing astronomy, so I'm
guessing it has something to do with scientific computing.

Question 1: do you want to build them yourself, or buy full systems?

OEM: Dell's fine, though to talk to someone in support about Linux, you
need "enterprise support", *not* desktop support.  Right now, I'm on an
AMD, but Dell Precision T3500 workstation, I *think* it ran around $2k
when we got it a year and a half or two years ago; the newer ones are the
same price. I'm running CentOS 6.4. Pretty much anything you buy, except
*possibly* for just-released-in-the-last-month hardware is supported: it
may not be ultra-heavy gaming ready, but for anything else, yes.

Our servers with Intel are running Xeons, of course, as well as the one
workstation I just looked at....

        mark