New Computer - I want some form of Linux with XP on the side...

[R.G.]

It's embarassing admissions time.

I use a four-way KVM switch and run from one to four machines all the time. That sounds downright silly, but there is a minor purpose.
- I periodically have to hit the road for up to a couple of weeks. My email stays on a laptop all the time, so I don't have to backup and cross-load it for a road trip.
- I have some moderately heavy duty design applications that eat up most of the cpu, disk and memory on an entire machine.
- One of the machines is a "data furnace", running backups and acting as a file server for the house data network. This machine, for instance, runs FreeNAS with a couple of other virtual machines running server apps for the house net. The TV, audio playback, and my Dearly Espoused's machines sip from the server applications.
- One machine is a "rented mule", and does tasks that may lead to its being flushed and refilled as needed; it's modestly sacrificial.
There have been a couple of times where simply having another machine that can access the net has saved my bacon. I stumbled into this backwards, having the machines, then finding how great it was when something died.

I may have to go to an 8-way KVM, as I recently found I need a CAD program that was left behind by the move from XP to Win7 in the industry. It's easier and cheaper for me to set up an XP machine as a protected shelter for the application than to buy the new version that runs on 7+.

[big_teee]

RG, doesn't all those Computers take up some real estate?
T

[bob p]

There are potentially two issues:

If the right driver for your video card isn't installed, and you have a LCD monitor, your monitor might not be running at its "native resolution". It will look dreadful.

In the last few years, every OS has switched to using anti-aliasing on their text and graphics by default. (MS call it "Cleartype") Some OSs use more than others, and if overdone it can give a soft appearance to everything.

Exactly. You need the right video driver, and if you're using an LCD monitor then you need to run in native resolution. Get either of those wrong and things will look bad. A lot of people learned to do resolution hopping in the days of the CRT, and those old habits are hard to break. Unfortunately, although that worked well with CRT, it doesn't work well at all with LCD and LED displays that have fixed resolution.

Steve is spot-on with the reference to anti-aliasing fonts. Cleartype comes standard in Win 7, but not in XP. You can, however, add it to XP with one of the tweaker's packs that come from Mircosoft and that will put an end to the "XP is blurry" debate.

Finally, linux fonts used to be a nightmare, but now that anti-aliasing is available in linux, the blurry font problem isn't a problem anymore. Win7 video isn't any better than any other video system as long as the other video systems are properly configured. Why people like Win7 is that it's designed to do the work so you don't have to become involved in implementing a proper solution. This is exactly the kind of "upgrade" that MS is selling to Win 7 customers -- the pre-configured video is a salespitch targeted at people who don't want to be bothered with knowing what's going on under the hood.

[bob p]

If we're going to play KVM Confessions: back when I was a linux developer I used to have a computing cluster set up in my basement to perform distributed C compilation across a 16-box compling farm. I found that three 4-way KVM and a 2-way KVM wasn't enough. What worked out better for me was remote unix "screen" sessions in text mode over SSH, putting 16 text mode displays onto a single GUI desktop that spanned three 1600x1200 21-inch monitors. That, and I had a master C compiling utility that would oversee the distributed compiling in the cluster, and track each machine's progress graphically. Watching the cluster perform distributed compiling was actually quite impressive. With a single PC, the process of compiling an entire linux distribution CD from source code would take about a month of compiling time on a desktop PC. with the compiling farm the CPU tasks stopped being disk-bound and I could cut the entire process down into a few hours.

That was in the good old days. Sadly, I don't have the three 21" monitors any more. That setup consumed kilowatts of electricity and generated enough heat that I didn't have to use my house furnace to heat the basement in sub-zero weather. It was actually quite warm and toasty in the cluster room. I'd work in shorts and a t-shirt in the winter time. The setup became a huge liability during the summer months, as the AC demand became astronomical.

Today more things are virtualized and I can't remember the last time that I used a KVM. My old KVM collection probably wouldn't even work with a modern PC anyway, as they all have VGA and PS/2 connections instead of and DVI and USB.

Even with virtualization and remote access, I still maintain a handful of infrastructure boxes on the LAN (for things like dedicated firewall, intrusion detection, file server, automated backup server, etc.). Those boxes are all fine-tuned to the point that they're running headless, and if I ever need to log onto the boxes to perform administrative tasks I end up doing it in text mode over SSH. That's resulted in weaning of the number of PC in the house that actually have chairs and keyboards attached to them down to 3 workstations that are set up with anywhere from 2 to 6 flat panels.

Unlike most people, who seem to like having wide-screen displays for watching movies, I prefer a multi-display setup with multiple 4:3 monitors in portrait mode. It's the best thing in the world for working with documents or code. Even though I don't do Windows, I think that 90-degree video rotation feature in Win7 is really nice.

[R.G.]

RG, doesn't all those Computers take up some real estate?
T

It's not that bad. The important part of that is the KVM switch that lets me use one keyboard, mouse and monitor that sit on the desk top. The machines are a two-wide, two-high stack beside the desk, with the KVM on top. I was afraid of power-usage issues early on, and tested the whole mess on a single outlet strip attached to a Kill-a-Watt. Startup gets higher, but the whole mess runs on 375W when it's up and running. But then I do pay attention to the design power figures for processors and memory. I tend to not use processors over 65W TDP, and I don't use mega-resolution display adapters. For my work, onboard or on-processor graphics are good enough, and that's terrifically lower power.