Assemble your PC #3 : Operating system

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Assemble your PC #1 : The basics
Assemble your PC #2 : Choosing the parts

What operating system am I going to use?

Before you buy components, be sure that they are supported by the operating
system you plan to use. Almost all current, commonly available PC devices have
drivers available for current versions of Windows (generally, anything 2000, XP,
Vista, or newer); if you want to run an alternative operating system, you’ll have
to do some research; many alternatives have extensive ’Hardware Compatibility
Lists’ as well as software comaptibility.

Windows hardware support lists
Windows XP supports most processors and motherboards based on the i386
(x86; 32-bit) or x86 64 (AMD64/EM64T; 64-bit) architectures. Put simply, all
available consumer processors (especially from AMD or Intel) will work with
the Windows XP operating system.

Linux hardware support lists
As one of the most popular free operating systems, Linux is a very good alternative.
It has versions for many different architectures, including i386, x64 and
PowerPC, though i386 versions are much more common. It will also support all
kinds of processors, enabling it to be used on Palm PCs and even iPods. There
are many different versions of Linux, produced by different companies. These
are called ’distributions’ or ’distros’ for short. For a desktop PC, you should
make sure to pick a desktop distro, one where the company/organisation has
desktop users in mind, e.g. Ubuntu, SimplyMEPIS or Mandriva. SUSE is also a
good choice, and has tools that make it easy to use as a server. Ubuntu has won
many awards from PC magazines and is noted for being particularly easy to use
(for basic tasks, e.g. web, email, word processing). It should be noted, however,
that many popular programs, especially games, are not available for Linux, and
the only way to run them is with special compatibility layers or programs like
Wine, which may or may not work with a specific program.
All this is important to bear in mind as different distros will support different
hardware (generally more ’bleeding-edge’ distros will support newer hardware
look at Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, but not the stable release of Debian). A good
rule of thumb is to buy hardware that is 12 to 18 months old, as it most likely
has Linux support with most distros, but won’t be too old.

Previous topics
Assemble your PC #1 : The basics
Assemble your PC #2 : Choosing the parts