*BSD News Article 41872


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From: alex@phred.org (alex wetmore)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Newbie question...
Date: 29 Jan 1995 22:16:31 GMT
Organization: Phred Networking
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Duane Hay (duane@CAM.ORG) wrote:
: I'm interested in running a free Unix on a PC.  I need to know the 
: minimum hardware requirements for a full implementation of FreeBSD.  I 
: will be purchasing a new PC just for this OS, so I need to know the least 
: I should buy.  If there is a FAQ that lists minimum req's please point me 
: in that direction, if not, a reply here will be sufficient.  Thanks in 
: advance.

Not sure of any FAQ.  Anyway, it really depends on what you want to do
with the machine.  For a standalone machine without X and not much
development work (ie, something that just sits and runs email, etc)
you should be able to get away with a 386/33, 4 megs of ram, 120 megs
of disk, mono display and video.

If you want to do development it doesn't make sense to get less then a 
486dx2/50 or 486dx2/66 (I use a 486sx/25 and can't say I'm disappointed
with the performance, but the extra $100 to get a dx2/66 would certainly
be worth it).  You'll also want 8 megs for development.

The same rules hold for doing X stuff.  Here a math coprocessor actually
makes a pretty big speed boost (for doing stuff like drawing circles, 
scaling fonts, etc).  If you're doing development under X you'll probably
want 12 or 16 megs of ram, but 8 will work (most people I know with 8
want to upgrade their memory).  You'll want more disk (at least 340 or
so).

For X you should get an accelerated video card.  I've had good luck with
ATI Mach32 based cards and S3 based cards.  Spend the extra $20 or so
to get localbus, its worth it.

My machine is:
 486sx/25
 16 megs of ram
 128k cache
 1gig SCSI disk
 250meg IDE disk
 S3-911 ISA based video card (this is a very old card).
 15" CTX 1560 monitor (great monitor for the price, but they don't make
   it anymore.  i haven't seen the newer CTXs so I can't recomend them.
   some of their stuff is great, some of it is awful).

The main things that I would like to upgrade are the CPU (a 486dx2/66 is
probably what I'll get) and the cache (bringing it up to 256k).  More
memory would be nice, but I mostly want it for NT work, not BSD.  I don't
really need more disk space (I use ~700 megs for BSD and ~700 megs for
NT.  Currently I have >100 megs of space free for both systems, and have
a pretty good application set in /usr/local under BSD).

alex