Hey folks,

I'm looking for people to volunteer some hardware for Cerberus development. This doesn't necessarily mean shipping the hardware anywhere; it just means installing Linux 2.6.31+ on it (and some other tools we'd need), enabling SSH and giving it a public IP address.

We're looking primarily to do performance testing. This means that a very wide variety of hardware would be incredibly useful. In fact, if someone could manage to get a really old Pentium or Pentium II machine running, that'd be awesome. Even a new netbook running an Intel Atom processor would be great to test on.

The thing about performance testing is that if your machine is fast enough, you'll never see the performance bottlenecks, or they won't be bad enough for you to do anything about them. If you have slow enough hardware, it really magnifies what bottlenecks are the worst. We really want Cerberus (and our other projects) to run on everything. And nicely, at that.

So please let me know if you have any machines available, and what the specs are (most important ones would be CPU, RAM, video card, and hard drive capacity).

Thank you.

Unfortunately I don't have any crap computers lying around, but I will ask around and see if anyone has anything they are willing to "donate." In the meantime, you could check out a virtual private server, such as ChunkHost (.com) which is giving away 512MB RAM 20gb hard drive slots on their machines for free right now to help beta test. The machines are pretty powerful, but it should let you test RAM bottlenecks at least.

EDIT:
A friend would be willing to let you use his "twofish" computer. http://twofish.zonenberg.com/index.php?page=systems

I've still got a Pentium MMX (200 MHz or something like that) on my attic, it can be used.

But there is only one problem, I'm not allowed to let any pc run 24/7 nor at night (GMT+1). So I dunno how much of a help it is towards you guys.

But I can install Linux on it and plug it onto my netwerk and so.

You know how to contact me.

That's ideal. I am fairly certain that would be considered an i586 rather than i686. I'm fairly certain Ubuntu still supports i586. And if all else fails, there's always Gentoo (but installing it on a Pentium MMX could be traumatic, depending on which snapshot you use and how much has to be recompiled).
Hm. We'll just have to work out scheduling our access to it, I guess.

I'll be taking off to another city somewhere near February, they have several computing graduation courses there. As soon as I get settled and start making friends I'll see how I can help!

My server here at home is a little Atom machine (I love it).

How much load would it put on the machine? I only use the server for hosting a Rails app, so as long as it doesn't crash, I'm good with allowing it to be used for performance testing.

Specs:
Intel D945GCLF2d mobo w/ Intel Atom 330 (1.6GHz, Dual-core, 64-bit)
1GB DDR2 RAM @ 533MHz (same speed as the Atom's FSB)
20GB WD Caviar IDE HD
Intel GMA 950

And I leave it on 24/7

I also have my desktop here, but I don't think you'll want it seeing as it is relatively new and up-to-date (6GB RAM, 2.7GHz dual-core AMD, Overclocked 9500GT ...)

Linux is already on the server (of course) running Karmic Koala. (I will soon upgrade to a Lucid alpha, but not if you'll be using it for testing)

EDIT: Oh, it also already has some dev tools installed (including an SSH server) and obviously has a public IP.