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It has been awhile since we have purchased workstation hardware for a new system. We settled on the Asus P4B w/ a Geforce2 MX400 AGP video card. As of February 2002, it seemed like the best CPU value was a P4 1.7GHz. We are running Sorcery GNU/Linux so we can squeeze out all of the performance possible. To get sound to work, we used CONFIG_SOUND_ICH=y in the kernel. ICH stands for Intel Controller Hub. The P4B uses an ICH2, but w/ kernel 2.4.17, this works just fine. The sound is ac97_codec. We also cast a few spells for various games and sound utilities. Casting spells is how you do things in Sorcery Linux... "cast gnome" figures out dependencies, downloads the source and compiles gnome... we kid you not. For graphics, we are running XFree86 4.2.0. We made sure CONFIG_AGP=y, and CONFIG_AGP_INTEL=y in the kernel. For some reason, the Sorcery links didn't work for the drivers. We downloaded NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-2313.tar.gz, and NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2314.tar.gz from the NVIDIA site. Just extract somewhere and make, make install. The README is good. Read it. :) Pretty much all you have to do is edit your XF86Config file, replace driver="nv" with driver="nvidia", make sure you load the "glx" module in the Module section, and don't load the DRI module. Our favorite tool to test the performance of the graphics is Tux Racer. Lookin' good, Linux, Lookin' good. Oh... a side note. Blackbox has been updated here. We are a bit confused, because this is not the old home page. It appears that a different developer is working on it? This is fine with us, because we love Blackbox, and wish it was kept up to speed. For more info on Blackbox, check out this article.
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