[GRASS-user] machine specs

[Hamish]

nicholas wrote:
> I am considering purchasing a cheap second-hand laptop to
> install linux on, and also GRASS.
> 
> I want to be able to run GRASS on the laptop.
> 
> I do not intend to do heavy processing. I only want to demonstrate
> GRASS, show of the various features and prove that it works.
> 
> What minimum hardware specifications are recommended for
> GRASS?

If I may take a stab at it:

Pentium-1 75MHz, 128mb RAM, 800x600 SVGA screen, 4gig hard drive.
(no kidding, that used to be my old home PC from spare parts. wrote
r.univar, r.in|out.mat, and r.in.xyz on that)

i.e. it'll pretty much run on anything, but if you want to work with large
datasets you'll want more power. The core GIS + raster map libraries were
written with the power of an IBM XT in mind... a nice side effect of that
frugality is that it scales rather well. From a design point of view it
is great to develop on crappy old hardware, the bottle necks are much more
apparent and you have motivation to fix them. field test your new
electronics with the batteries half dead, as that's when the problems will
show up...


Of course remember that the user experience on a slow PC will be slow,
and the user may/will blame that on GRASS instead of the old laptop..

If going with a really low RAM/CPU laptop, I'd spend some time looking
into dumping Gnome/KDE eye candy WMs and using Fluxbox or XFCE ...
Linux runs great on old hardware if you take the time to replace the RAM/
CPU hungry user apps. Especially hardware drivers become more perfect the
older the hardware gets. (see also sylpheed/mutt/pine, qiv, rexima/mpg123/
cdcd, top "M", galeon/dillo, xpdf, gv, ...)


Hamish