Linux grass platforms

[Donald R. Newcomb]

In article <9410081001.AA04680 at devin.fns.uniba.sk>,
Jaro Hofierka <grassu-list at max.cecer.army.mil> wrote:
>According to HOWTO's on sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/docs/LDP there
>are not reported problems with Pentium processors. There might be 

There has been some discussion on comp.os.linux.help of late, about some
problems with some (90 MHz?) Pentium processors and Linux. I have not
tuned in very well to that discussion as I'm a long way from a 90 MHz
Pentium. You may want to search that newsgroup for "Pentium".

>only problems with PCI-based machines. The list of tested
>boards,cards,... is available on the ftp site above.
>The most important thing running Linux with X-win and GRASS
>is to have a lot of RAM and a big hard disk (however some
>problems may occur installing Linux on machines with IDE disks 
>bigger than 540 Megs).

The size of your RAM is probably the single most important factor in
performance. Linux (as I understand) uses any extra memory as a big
disk cache. Second most important for GRASS would be the speed of
your video card. I was amazed how quickly the GRASS 3D demo ran on
a rather vanilla Gateway 486/33 with 32MB of RAM. After reading the
Spearfish data files once, it did not go back to disk again. The
data was all in cache. All the system had to do was re-render the
view 8 times from memory. 

As for disk space, what can I say? You need enough, which is always a
bit more than you have.
-- 
Donald R. Newcomb              * University of Southern Mississippi
dnewcomb at whale.st.usm.edu      * "The God who gave us life gave us liberty
dnewcomb at falcon.st.usm.edu     * at the same time."  T. Jefferson (1774)