Hardware for client Ubuntu

This has been asked tens of times before, so you'd do well to go back and look at those answers.

Generally I recommend Acer Aspire Revo R3700 machines as they perform well and are inexpensive.

Basically you need nVidia graphics and hardware that is otherwise supported by Ubuntu.

Alex

thanks,

"This has been asked tens of times before, so you'd do well to go back and look at those answers."
yes i look befor but i was not sure

"Acer Aspire Revo R3700" : it is possible to buy this model without windows ?

do you think is possible add network wifi card ? (usb maybe) ?

Yes - it's available without Windows in the UK. Not sure about the rest of the world.

It already has wifi built in.

Alex

The Acer Aspire Revo is just one example of an Intel Atom based Nettop. There are many more examples, like the Asus EEE Box, MSI Wind Box, Zotac Zbox. You can safely install any wifi card on those; some, like the Zotax, even offer an onboard wifi module. Furthermore, support for AMD and ATI chipsets in Ubuntu is becoming quite common; but, I would prefer an Atom solution if you don't want to play around too much with the drivers and settings.

Bear in mind, that you do not necessarily need a new computer to run the xibo client. A second hand pentium 3 or 4 with at least 512mb internal memory will also do fine. The same reasoning applies to the xibo server.
Granted, the Atom based pc's are very handy to mount behind an LCD screen!

The Asus eeeBox is NOT suitable in my experience - hence the recommendation for nVidia graphics.

I'm not sure what graphics the MSI or Zotac boxes use, but be very careful. Any old "Atom based nettop" may not be suitable.

Alex

I think you are referring to the video capabilities of the chipsets, and manufacturer's support in Linux? I can tell that since the development of many mediacenter applications for linux, ati and amd have picked up the slack, and are well away to provide the same support as intel does. But any customer wanting to run linux should first check support for their video chipset. A good forum for more cutting edge linux driver development/talk are the XBMC forums over at www.xbmc.org

I'm referring to support in libavg/OpenGL for the graphics chipset.

It's developed almost exclusively on nVidia hardware. They strongly recommend that above anything else. It plain doesn't work on some ATI hardware and works poorly on alot of newer Intel hardware.

It has nothing to do with "Linux support" in general, although one is a prerequisite for the other.

I'd appreciate it if you would understand this and stop recommending people buy any old PC that Linux will run on, as in the end they're likely to get something that either doesn't work, or works badly.

Alex

Point taken. Clearly you perceive this support section from a developer's point of view, and I fully respect and understand that. Mea culpa. But then, in all honesty, the project might be better off providing explicit hardware specifications in the python-client wiki, as this particular question pops up loads of times, and your comment on libavg and openGL can be helpful to many. Then, from a developer's point of view, one would be able to bifurcate the feasible/workable solutions from the fully supportable ones by simply referring to the recommended hardware list. I think that in its current state, the wiki leaves room for ambiguity, -it mentions only 1 possible client, the acer revo, while at the same time it actually gives pointers to users with different hardware, such as intel or ati video cards, and makes reference to the fact that "most reasonably modern pc's should be fine" to run the client- which is reflected in the myriad of topics on suggested hardware here on launchpad. For me, I am just slightly elaborating on these lines from the wiki. I'd suggest to be far more explicit in communicating system specs, otherwise we will keep running into these nomenclatural arguments, which I would like to avoid because of the fact that I deeply appreciate you and your team's hard work on this great piece of software.

The client will run on most modern hardware (but not necessarily run well), but if the question is "I'm buying something specially, what's the best to buy" then that's a very different scenario.

There is already a list of known good hardware in the wiki:
http://wiki.xibo.org.uk/wiki/Python_Client_Hardware_Compatibility_List

Alex

I'll look at adding a reference to the compatibility list in the download section of the website - that should hopefully be useful and clear up some confusion.