This system appears to be well supported by Fedora Core 5 (at least as evidenced by Test 3).
Notes:
- If you are using a SATA drive, before installation you must set "Serial ATA RAID Mode" to "Enabled" in the BIOS.
- The onboard video has problems at resolutions above 1024x768. There may be a fix for this, but since this system will be primarily used as a server, I haven't spent the time to investigate. 1024x768 works fine. I haven't tested the DVI port.
- I'm using an AMD Athlon 64 (939) 3200+ 90nm and the Cool'N'Quiet feature appears to have worked out of the box with FC5.
- If you decide to configure lm_sensors, run sensors-detect and always accept the defaults. Do not attempt to use smbus (use ISA!!!). I attempted to use smbus and X stopped working.
- The onboard audio works (at least in 2-channel mode) with FC5.
- The onboard Gigabit Ethernet works with FC5. I haven't test throughput on it, though.
- I haven't tested the FireWire, but Linux does appear to recognize it.
The system is fairly quiet, but definitely not silent. I don't have a audio meter, so I can't give good numbers for comparison. I have the fan for the CPU cooling system (ICE) set to smart in the BIOS and if I turn off all the other computers in the room, I can hear the fan speed adjust if I trigger a CPU intensive task. All in all, I'm very happy with the box. The optical drive I have in the box sounds like a tornado, but it doesn't get used all that often!
