[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
“My son’s hand-me-down motherboard recently gave
up the ghost, and I decided that was a good excuse for an upgrade.
Shopping around, I found that multi-core CPUs were finally in my
price range, so I decided to build him a quad-core system. This
build worked out extremely well, with almost no configuration
problems, not even for accelerated 3D graphics or ALSA sound
— all using the latest Debian GNU/Linux (which means
it’ll also work with Ubuntu or other derivatives). This one
has that “classic” feel — everything just clicked
into place. So I wanted to document it here. This also serves as a
technology update to my earlier article on selecting hardware for a
free-software-friendly system.“I started by looking for an appropriate CPU and motherboard
combination. I’ve been a fan of AMD CPUs for some time, so I
looked for that. AMD boards tend to have ATI graphics chipsets
built into them (since AMD owns ATI), and ATI has been the
best-supported OpenGL chipset with free software drivers, so
that’s another factor.”