I finally bit the bullet and bought a new development machine. I spent a few weeks looking at what was available, waffling between vendors, and figuring out what I wanted. I considered getting a Mac this time around, but just couldn’t justify the $1k premium over what I could build myself. Not everyone can build a reasonable machine themselves, however, and those people should either find a pet geek or stick with the likes of Apple, Dell, and HP.

The selection process

My method for figuring out bang-for-buck is simple: I don’t let my inner consumer get the best of me. I don’t need the best video card, I don’t need a 42-channel sound board, and I don’t need 22Gb of RAM. What I need is a snappy, quiet development PC. It doesn’t need to play all of the newest games; it only needs to be fast enough to improve my productivity over the current development machines in my home office (a P3-600 XP workstation and a P4-1600 FC4 laptop).

I also wanted to make sure that the component quality was better than the last set of PCs we ordered in our office, which were from a vendor who we trusted to select the components for us. That particular vendor provided low-cost hardware, at the expense of poorly selected, low quality parts.

Based on my experience with smaller vendors, I suggest strongly against “pre-configured” machines where you don’t have the option to specify individual components. I find that most places cut costs on vital components, like power-supplies, cases, and CD/DVD drives. It’s always worth dropping a few Ghz of CPU for a quality enclosure, power supply, RAM, and other bits.

Luckily my needs are simple, and my choices vast. I spent 1/4 of what I spent in 1997 and 2/3 what I spent in 2003 on development systems, getting an ample dual core AMD AM2, 2Gb DDR2-800, 250GB storage, and a 22in LCD display. I’m very happy with the components so far: the machine is quiet, snappy, and the display is a huge improvement over my aging Trinitron CRT.

Setting it up

The machine came built and tested, with XP pre-installed. All that was left was to run the updates, add my own applications, and install Linux. Windows update and application installation took a few hours to run (and reboot, and reboot again), and the ‘nix install took about about an hour (including updates and automatix).

Installing Ubuntu

I have to say that I was really impressed with the latest Ubuntu installer. I popped in the live CD while Windows was running, and it came up with an ‘OSS Windows tools’ browser and the option to install. I ran the installer, which asked me a few questions (partitioning, etc.) and then went off to install. The base system install ran from within XP, with the remainder finishing when the system rebooted to the new desktop.

After running the system updates I ran the Automatix scripts, which install all of the 3rd-party (and non-free) applications you normally need on a machine (nvidia drivers, java, acrobat, flash, mplayer, codecs, google apps, etc.). I found it interesting that NVidia’s tools for Linux are now as good (or better) than on Windows (including UI configuration and everything), and applications like Google Earth and Picassa run as well too. I will really only be booting to XP to do software development for that platform.

Over the next few days, I’ll post some mini-reviews of Ubuntu and the various tools it provides.