[gNewSense-users] Re: MIPS desktop, tower or 1U vendor in Europe

[Daniel Clark]

Lars Nooden wrote:
> Are there any vendors that can be recommended for Europe (EURo zone in
> particular) that sells MIPS-based PCs with desktop, tower or 1U or 2U
> forms?   I'm looking for something that has room for peripheral cards
> and other devices and comes with or is upgradable to 8 or so GB of RAM.

In general there doesn't seem to be much mipsel hardware available.

Loongson2f CPU is limited to 2GB of RAM, so that's out, unless like you
you like playing with clusters, in which case http://www.tekmote.nl or
myself can hook you up with a bunch of fuloongs (but be warned that they
max out at 1GB, but 8 of them = 8GB would be less than US $1000).

The massive deal in the mipsel world at this point are used SiCortex
boxes SC072-PDS, available on eBay and simular sites for $1200-$2500
(oroginal price around $25,000). These have 48GB RAM, 72 mipsel
processors, 100 GFLOPs, but only run a customized version of gentoo at
the moment; but there is no reason you couldn't hack on them to make
them run something else. I don't know what exactly the deal is with
freedom on them; HPC friends tell me SiCortex was extraordinarily open
for a supercomputer company, but I don't know how far down that
translates into their hardware.

Other than those options I don't know of anything; you may have more
luck looking through http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Systems than I did
(note that there is one there that looks like it would be perfect, but
ends up being big-endian).

If you can wait a while, loongson3 is coming and amongst other things
will support decently large amounts of memory. Possibly sooner will be
loongson2g, but don't know what exactly the differences other than speed
will be there.

> Nice if gNewSense is pre-installed, to ensure compatibility.

Right now only mipsel box really supported by gNewSense is yeeloong (see
previous reply). If someone feels like buying me or giving me root on a
SiCortex box, I can look into getting gNewSense on one, at least in a
chroot environment or lxc VM :-D

-- 
Daniel JB Clark | http://pobox.com/~dclark