CeBIT 2004 -- Report
During the exhibition the Debian booth was approached by H2O, a manufacturer of low-noise cooling aggregates and computers. They demonstrated a water-cooled Pentium IV machine running at 3.7 GHz (overclocked, called a »5000+ System«) but many visitors wanted to know whether GNU/Linux would run on it as well.
So they approached the Linuxland booth to purchase some CDs for installation. Hence, Alexander Schmehl helped them install Debian on the machine. The installation of the base system took less than 5 minutes, and they decided to install the desktop environment, games, office environment and German environment task: quite some packages. The entire installation was done in less than 15 minutes.
It could have been faster, though. The bottleneck were the CD drive (although it was a 48 speed drive), network connection and disc drive. Those components couldn't keep up with the processor speed.
The kernel said that it has some 7372.9 Bogomips (if that counts anything). Playing around a little bit with XFree86 he got 4540.8 fps with glxgears, and 500 fps while playing Tuxracer. Xaos runs quite good (even in a 1600x1200 true color resolution).
This machine does not only exist for the show, but can purchased as well (around € 999.00!). H2O calls it the »fastest freely available (i386) computer at CeBIT«.
