Hello, I´m a PC user that likes a lot Linux, I recently was brosing the web searching a new computer for me I found this Pegaoso, but I had some questions about it
1º) I think that 600$ only for a motherboard that only can have a 1Ghz processor only have a 1.1 USB and has only 3 PCI is too much, I´m forgeting soomething?
2º) I read that the motherboard can use more than one processor, where i can put the second because in the photos I don´t see any second socket.
3º) This motherboard uses a PowerPc, I don´t know any more about them that they are used in the Mac, and if the processor is from a Mac: this means that all the hardware is needed to be from Mac?
4º) Searching about the PowerPC I found that actually there is a G5 (i dont know what means that) but the Pegasos only can use a G3 (I think it´s too slow) or a G4, this means that the Pegasos is an old machine?
5º) With the PC i know that i can purchase any hardware and there will be supported by the Linux core what about the Pegasos drivers

And the most important do you think that I should buy a Pegasos if I´m not a hardware or driver developer?

Thanks for your attenction I excuse me by my poor english (im spanish)

It's more than the cost of a PC but not more than the cost of a LOW POWER PC. If you bought a Pentium M motherboard of the same power consumption (1.1GHz ULP version of the processor, ~10W in operation) it would cost you $200 for the motherboard and $450 for the rare CPU.

3 PCI is more than you will need considering the specifications of the board. We currently ship AGP graphics card and are thinking about a USB 2.0 card in one of the slots for our prebuilt machines. That still leaves you with two slots for.. more powerful soundcard? Storage controller?

You will already have Firewire onboard for external disks and video/audio editing. Do you really need to add disks internally for storing downloads or movies? Firewire housings and disks are very cheap these days.

The optical audio out is the highest quality audio you can get. So why buy a soundcard just to get another optical or coaxial digital audio feed?

Check out the Mac Mini which hasn't even got a microphone socket, only two
USB and a single Firewire port in comparison. Once you buy your Mac Mini you are stuck with your Radeon 9200 and your 1.25GHz processor forever.
You may also be disappointed with the 4200rpm disk (very slow) and the weak DVD drive.

The Pegasos is expandable.

The highest we have TODAY is 1GHz G4, but not very far in the future we will have 1.4GHz and possibly 1.8 to 2.0GHz processors to ship. You can buy them when they are available. Yet again, you do not get this option on Mac and we will have a much longer usage of these processor slots than AMD or Intel use on their designs (they have changed sockets 2 times in the last 3 years, we have no need to change it for Pegasos)
The dual CPU card will have both CPUs on the same card. You don't need a second socket as they share this bus. This is electrically a better, faster solution than two sockets and it means you will have an easier method of upgrading; take one card out and put the new one in.
Not at all! Our firmware supports booting PC graphics cards (using an x86 BIOS emulator) and properly initialises other devices, so you don't need to spend $200+ extra on a Mac device. If you run Linux you can use the drivers for ethernet, audio and so on as if it was a PC - all the same assumptions about card state on boot are identical.

The exception to this is storage; if you want to boot from an external storage controller it will need to either have motherboard firmware support (I can get a comprehensive list of SCSI/SATA controllers we have supported or planned) or an Open Firmware compatible firmware on the card ("Option ROM").

This is more of a theoretical point as I rarely have seen someone buy a brand new motherboard and then instantly replace the boot controller with some other device. Under Windows you would never boot the system ever again We are investigating solutions using boot loaders, and cheap flash controllers which would fix this for you.
No. The G5 is merely a 64bit implementation of the PowerPC architecture.

This does not mean the same thing as it does under x86 (Pentium vs. AMD Opteron) because there is no inherent difference between 32 and 64bit PowerPC architectures which give instant enhanced speed. The same number of registers are used. The same functional units are implemented.

The main benefit is you can use much more than 4GB of memory, but this is rare or impossible on 99% of the shipping Apple and Intel/AMD motherboard solutions anyway due to the memory controller and lack of slots for memory on the motherboard.

Technically the G4 and G5 are identically clocked and the G4 has a much lower latency in cache, memory access and instruction execution. This means it can do much more work tick for tick on the GHz clock. The G4 is more efficient and runs cooler. The only thing the G4 isn't is 64bit.
Pegasos is 100% supported for internal hardware by Linux kernel 2.6.12 and above. As for drivers there is a good chance any hardware you buy will just plug in and work if there is support in the kernel, again as stated above. What you will not get is nVidia x86 binary drivers for graphics cards, for example. These kinds of drivers for Linux are quite rare though, most of the support is actually built into the kernel instead and is Open Source.
Your English is better than my Spanish

As a PC user, the best case for buying a Pegasos is if you were ever tempted to buy one of the Via EPIA motherboards with the low-power low-noise processors. We have tested these boards (and many others have online) and they offer very very low performance for their price; a 1GHz processor on a Via board is HALF the performance of that of our 1GHz PowerPC, just doing simple operations. The Via platform backs the processor up by having many peripheral chips like MPEG decoders. The G4 can do this on it's own.

The G4 also includes an instruction unit called "AltiVec" which is like Intel's SSE but much, much better. The performance gains on code written to utilise it are anything from 2x to 16x at the very basic level; some code written properly has seen 40x speedups. With SSE this kind of optimisation is possible but much harder to acheive for software developers.

The way the G4 is designed means that in vector performance it is guaranteed to far, far exceed the capability of the Via chip mentioned above, and when you add AltiVec into the equation, it simply blows it out of the water.

==
Matt Sealey
Genesi, Manager, Developer Relations

Yes, Altivec is really really cool!
I think that it's the most important difference between x86 and PowerPC.
Checkout this benchmark: http://pegasos.jinak.cz/clanky/powerpc/ ... ession.gif

ok, perhaps its best to wait for a pegasus that had USB 2.0 and a PCI-X

@Rarok -- We will say "thank-you" for you...

Thank you Neko.

R&B

P.S. USB2 is simple - PCI card. The rest of what you want is coming, BUT you cannot go faster than the silicon - we are just a systems integrator.

Actually I've run 2.6.10 and 2.6.11 vanilla kernels and they work just fine. The only patch I applied to them is the ASFS patch so that I can read my MOS drive. The only other thing that was missing with the gigabit ethernet driver, but that is in the .12 release candidates now.

I've also run -mm and -ck patched kernels and they work perfectly. I've tried -no, -skunk, and -love patched kernels with some success, but those are pretty experimental patch sets.

--Aaron
Gentoo 2005.0
Kernel: 2.6.12-rc6-love1

excuse me fo forgetng say Thanks ok I really don´t know what you are really doing, the website don´t says a lot... im thinking that probably it will best for me to wait some time before buy a Pegasos, perhaps when I learn more about programing... because if I buy it now if i had i would´t solve it by myself

Let's just say I do not agree with everything Neko wrote about G5 and the comparison to low power x86 CPUs.

@Rarok:

Don't be mistaken, the G4 family is still evolving and might outlive the G5 which seems to head towards the same dead-end as the power-hungry Pentium 4 Netburst architecture.

[Edited by tarbos on 2005-06-19]

ok, I think that I undertood, now i have two things that i need to think:

1º) Can be a good idea buy a Pegasos if now i don´t know programing
2º) If i buy it it´s best to buy it now or its best to wait for the PCI-X and the G5

Thanks to all you for solving my questions, only a suggestion to the webmaster, it can be a good thng that there was a something (a guide, a video, a wiki, FAQ... or other) that explains what is a Pegasus how it works, the different hardware that it can load...

We don't have such a list because it would be so long

Any hardware that works with Linux will probably work on Pegasos. We have
special measures in the firmware to ensure this; we have tried TV cards (BT448, Hauppauge PVR cards), sound cards (Audigy, TurtleBeach, Via Vinyl24), graphics cards (ATI 9200 series is fully supported, 9500, 9800 only 2D, also nVidia stuff only 2D - 3.3V AGP or any PCI), storage cards (IDE and Serial ATA and SCSI) and they all work with the drivers in the kernel or available Open Source.


If you don't know programming but want to just use Linux, Debian or Gentoo or Ubuntu, then we fully support this and all our internal hardware works. If you get into trouble this is the place to ask about it.


Why are you waiting for PCI-X? What is so good about it that you need a system that supports it? There are no PCI-X graphics cards, only very few storage cards. What's the hardware that makes you wait?

Do you actually mean PCI-Express? Because that hardware will cost you the same as the cost of the Pegasos! It is not so much fun to buy a $500 graphics card that doesn't even run on x86 Linux.

For the G5 you will wait forever from Genesi - we have no plans for 64bit processors from IBM currently, and you would have to give me a really good reason why you need it in order to take it seriously. There is no consumer Opteron or G5 board on the planet that supports the 64bit memory space properly, and there is no magic performance difference between 32 and 64bit on PowerPC as there is on x86.

There is a long technical explanation for the last bit, do you want it?

==
Matt Sealey
Genesi, Manager, Developer Relations

Yes A big mistak from me, I talked about PCI-Express, Only if it isn´t too work for you

I asked about the USB because in my PC i have a SoundCard, a SCSI card, a TV Card, and a USB card, but if the Pegasos has all inside the motherboard perhaps i wouldn´t need more than 3 PCI,
about the AGP what its the AGP speed? its a 4x?
can I use DDR-Ram 400 of 1Gbyte?
needs the processor a fan or it has passive cooling?
you say that in the future there will be new processor cards, but what is the limit of the slot?
about the case, i need a special case or i can buy a standard case?

Ok I´m very amazed about the Pegasos, and i never had any product of genesi or a PPC, but I´m making too many questions because it´s expensive and even more if you think that I´m from Spain and the delivery a the taxes are big, and the best thing of the Pegasus is that it has Free Hardware but at short time I´m not going to change any of it.

ATi make graphics cards with built-in TV-decoders, if you find one that is supported by Linux you don't have to use another slot for a TV-card and you will still have three slots available to you. The Pegasos has a built-in sound card so do you really need another one?
Even if you add all three of these things (SCSI, TV, USB) you still have enough slots.
If you are worried about performance you can always use FireWire which is also available on the Pegasos motherboard. FireWire is generally faster than USB because it is controlled by hardware, whereas with USB the operating system has to process the data, increasing CPU-load whenever you use a USB-device. If you want to use a USB mouse or keyboard (instead of PS/2) the built-in USB-controller will work just fine.
It's a 1x AGP port. At this point the "newest" card you can get that supports 3D-acceleration on Linux/ppc is a Radeon 9250. For this reason I doubt you will need a faster AGP port. Games like Cube and Vega Strike work just fine on the Pegasos.
If you are looking for a computer to use to play the latest commercial 3D-games Linux/ppc is not for you, then you should either get a PC with windows or a game console. The Pegasos is great for running desktop applications for surfing the web, office productivity and similar things, it also makes a great mid-range server considering the power/performance ratio. What it does not do right now is to make a good gaming platform, for the simple reason that game developers rarely target other platforms than windows.
If you in the future intend to play around with OpenGL-programming and the sort the Pegasos will work for you. A fast AGP-port is only important when you have a lot of very complex geometric objects and lots of textures that you need to send over the bus. As you can see from the screenshots of games like Cube and Vega Strike the Pegasos can still run pretty decent looking games without having the fastest AGP port around.
Yes.
Officially you are recommended to use a fan but several people have replaced it with the following heat sink http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/vie ... 1&code=014 without any known problems (yet).
As you know the PowerPC produces much less heat than a P4 or AMD CPU, and they are also more durable when it comes to overheating. Someone told me (maybe it was Neko) that the G4 can run at 105C for at least 10 years before breaking. A P4 would normally shut down as soon as the CPU reaches 70-75 degrees.
Since the Pegasos uses a CPU-card instead of fitting a CPU directly into the slot you do not have to use a CPU with the same pinout (as with PC-motherboards). If Freescale decide to design a new CPU with a different pinout Genesi would just design a new CPU-card for that model and it will still work with your current motherboard.
The motherboard follows the standard MicroATX formfactor. You can use any ATX or MicroATX case and a standard PC powersupply.
You can buy the Pegasos from a european distributor, that way you do not have to worry about import taxes. I know of at least two european distributors, http://www.ggsdata.se/ and http://www.vesalia.de/.
As for the price, I do not think it's really an expensive motherboard considering what you get. It has all the basic things built in, such as USB, FireWire, Sound, 2xGbit ethernet, 1x10/100 Mbit ethernet and IRDA. The CPU-slot is designed in such a way that you do not have to buy a new motherboard if Freescale decides to redesign the CPU. If you look at PC-motherboards with the same features (multiple ethernet, firewire, etc) I think you'll find that the motherboard will cost a bit more than the cheap models and on top of that you still have to buy the CPU and a fan/heatsink for it. Furthermore if Intel decides to change to a new CPU slot-type (like they have done several times already) your motherboard will suddenly be useless with new CPUs and you will have to buy a new one. So even though the Pegasos costs a little more to buy initially, I think you will see that you save a lot of money up ahead as you do not have to buy a new motherboard any time soon.

Personally I have used a Pegasos as my main desktop machine (running Linux) for almost two years now and I'm perfectly satisfied with it. I've upgraded the CPU once, from a G3 to a G4.

ok, thanks to all you, when I finish thee school at the end of this month I´m going to buy a Pegasos with a G4 1Ghz with 1Gb of RAM, A Radeon 9250 and a Hard-Disk of 300Gbytes, I probably will get a standard ATX case to put insede it some neon lights , I only have a bad thing to say about buyiong it I want to search in different websites to check who has the lowest prize but the website http://www.ggsdata.se/ isn´t in any lenguage that i can undertand.
I hope that when the Pegasos arrive to my home, all you help me with the first times of use, because in my live i ever had x86 computers with MS-DOS, Windows, and Linux, but I never see any Genesi computer or OS.

The Open Desktop Workstation (http://www.pegasosppc.com/odw.php) comes with Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo and Yellow Dog Linux. If you used ANY of those or anything similar(Debian and Ubuntu are similar, YDL is RedHat/Mandrake kind of thing), you will not have any problems with the OS. We will have an installation DVD available for download for all these distributions very shortly, otherwise you will be able to download most of them direct from the distribution sites themselves (Debian, Gentoo, hopefully Ubuntu) before then anyway.

Still, do feel free to post here any comments you have about the system and any problems you may have. Genesi looks forward to your order

--
Matt Sealey
Manager, Genesi, Developer Relations

thanks neko, but I´m going to buy in a european shop because i don´t want to pay taxes, I will try first the MorphOS, and I will use Debian,
And only a suggestion the case of the ODW it´s too boring,