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