Hi,

My recommendation is to buy some piece of standard hardware, and not
necessarily go for the
'oh-we-have-this-two-bucks-less-and-close-to-compatible-piece-of-hardware'
(yes, I *am* from Germany ;-) In any case, if you buy a new computer you
should be pretty happy with something in the Pentium >= 200Mhz range, plenty
of RAM (this never hurts, say 64MB or more) plus a decent sized hard disk.

Running Linux instead of Windows is actually a pretty good idea, unless you
need to use Word or anything alike. In general, Squeak is *very* happy with
Linux (I'm not sure about FreeBSD - there are not that many Squeakers on
FreeBSD out there) and the choice of your graphics hardware should depend on
the X-Server you're planning to use. Since I assume it will be XFree86 you
should visit www.xfree86.org and see for which hardware accellerated drivers
exist (these give you the most out of your hardware).

There is only one possible problem with running Squeak on Linux - some of
the multi-media stuff (e.g., sound and MIDI) is not supported by the
'standard' VM. However, I know that a couple of people on the list have been
working on this and so it should actually be possible to get a custom VM
from one of them.

Happy Squeaking,
  Andreas 
--
PLEASE NOTE NEW EMAIL ADRESS!

+===== Andreas Raab ========= (andreasr at wdi.disney.com) ==+
| Walt Disney Imagineering        Phone: +1 818 544 5016  I
I Glendale, CA                    Fax:   +1 818 544 4544  I
+======< http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~raab >========+


> ----------
> From: 	Eric Ryan
> Reply To: 	squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Sent: 	Tuesday, February 23, 1999 7:39 AM
> To: 	squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Cc: 	recipient list not shown
> Subject: 	getting started
> 
> I'd like to buy a PC and run squeak and a free unix on it, probably linux.
> 
> I know that I should get a 3 button mouse becuase I *don't* want to be
> pressing the control button to do simple gui things.  I don't know what
> kind of mouse to get, nor what sort of driver restrictions there are. I
> also don't know what sort of processor speed and RAM quantity would be
> appropriate for a Squeak developer.  Are there restrictions on the kind
> of video card?  Is there usefully better performance running squeak on
> standard intel hardware directly rather than having the squeak run on a
> unix running on the intel hardware?
>   Could someone please suggest a mouse and video card as well as minimal
> processor and memory?
>   Eric
>