I, personally, have had terrible luck with gateways. My family has bought a number of computers through them, and we've had a number of problems. - you certainly won't get tech support if you install linux (or do anything to your system other than turn it on), and the tech support is shotty. getting replacement parts is a major hassle. - the cases are poorly designed with hardly any ventilation. One of my gateway hard drives broke down -- I pulled it out and it was too hot to touch. I keep my side cover off. - the parts are, as is surely the case with other big-name computers, just good enough to get along running the preinstaled windows. Don't expect to find any feature on the motherboard that's not essential to the running of the computer. - _documentation_ -- gateway provides worthless documentation. The things you get with your machine are aimed at people that don't know how to turn a machine on, and their website documentation is mostly just a source to download windows drivers (a pain, i might add). enough of me tearing gateway apart. I've just had bad experience after bad experience with gateway. In terms of actually building your own machine, it's not as daunting (usually) as it may seem. Oftentimes, it can be as simple as buying the right parts and putting them into the case without electro-static-discharing through them. Then, you pop the machine on and throw linux in your cdrom (after maybe a minute of bios setup). I'm sure there are good resources for this all over the internet. I bought my gateway about 2 years ago, and immediately afterwards I regretted not making my own machine. It all depends, though, on your level of comfort. hope this helps cheers justin ranging from them sending us an incorrectly configured computer (for video editing), to the fac rpgoldman at real-time.com wrote: > waynej at dccmn.com writes: > > One problem I've seen is that there are some cheaper network cards, video > > cards, sound cards, etc. that are not supported on Linux. You might want > > to check the redhat hardware list (http://hardware.redhat.com) before you > > buy something. > > > > We bought several high power PCs with HighPoint IDE Raid chips on them > > (even though HighPoint claimed Linux compatibility), only to find the > > Linux drivers were only for an old release. > > > > Generally the brand names, though more expensive, are more likely to give > > less hassles. > > I had good luck with a gateway, using a strategy someone suggested --- > take a bootable linux distro (Knoppix) to the store. Boot. Play with > it a little and see if it works. Seems to have mostly worked for me > (but APM turns out not to work very well :-(). > > R > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list