Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: > That may be true. However, if you drop by your friendly neighbourhood > computer store you will be extremely lucky to find anything but ATI or > nVidia AGP cards [I had to buy a video card a few weeks ago, so I am > speaking from extensive experience in the field ;-). This is > consistent with what colleagues who deal in graphics tell me.]
Unfortunatley due to the customs strike, the only way to get anything decent in this country is to have it brought in. If you are lucky, you can get it past customs via DHL or FEDEX, if not, you have have to send someone. Having just tried to buy COTS (commercial off the shelf) boards for a project I'm working on, we lucked out and found a local company that was willing to use their leverage with the manufacurer and DHL them some boards. This diapointed my son Paul who almost spent a day in Tiawan. LCDs are another matter. The only ones you can get now are left over from when there was a high tech development industry in this country, 2 to 3 years ago. PC parts are those left over from before the strike. Not only are there "slim pickin's", but you are getting what everyone who looked at them before you would not buy. Sort of like the shuk at 3pm on Friday. No one is going to spend $50 to DHL a video card from Tiawan, and expect to sell it to you. As for the embeded system boards I for asked about two weeks ago, we did find a good dealer who will DHL boards until they get a stock. The boards we found are realativly cheap, about $500 each for development units. 3.5" floppy drive size, run on 5 volts at about 3 watts. They include a 300mHz Geode X86 processor, video chip, AC97 audio chip, 10/100 ethernet, 2 USB ports, 2 serial, parallel, ide and floppy interface. The development kits include full documentation, cables, a driver CD, 128m ram, and 256m "disk on chip", and a 5 to 12v power inverter for LCDs. If you stick a hard drive and CD rom on the IDE port, they will run linux out of the box. RH9 will install, but picks the wrong kernel (hint, it's really not a 686 processor). Baring that it works fine, X runs, networking etc. You can choose between a driver for the diskonchip that is closed, or open (both have advantages) and with 256m, squeeze a decent linux system on it. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 972-54-608-069 Icq/AIM Uin: 2661079 MSN IM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Not for email) ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
