How to enable SLI in FC5 b3?
 

Specs are as follows:

Coolermaster Centurion5 w/Antec NeoHE 550W
Abit AN8-SLI
Opteron 175 dual-core at 2.5Ghz
2GB Patriot Extreme Performance PC3200 DDR
2x Geforce 7800GTX in SLI
Creative Labs X-Fi
Logitech Z680 speakers
74GB WD Raptor
400GB Hitachi SATA
Samsung 16x Dual-Layer DVDRW
Liteon 16X DVDROM
Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW 20.1" widescreen flat panel

I know, the sound card has to go for now, I have decent 7.1 HD onboard sound I can use until Creative releases a driver sometime around 2013.

OK, I have never really liked Fedora, I will be honest. It was never as polished or user friendly as Mandrake or Suse, but from reading the reviews, FC5 looks slick. I am going to try it out while I wait for Suse 10.1 to be released. If it works, I may just stick with it.

Two issues that I always had with Fedora were multimedia support and getting NVidia 3D drivers working. It always seems like it should be simple, but I install the driver, edit some file, and no dice. Suse, all I had to do was click on the NVidia drivers in YAST and it did the rest. Easy as Windows.

Has it gotten better in Fedora, and can I easily get SLI working and have my desktop running at 1680x1050x24bit?

Also, how easy is it to get MP3, DVD, AVI, MPEG, DVIX and all that installed and working?

As for games, I typically play Half Life 2, Far Cry, Quake 4, UT2004, RTCW, COD2 and a couple others. I think that WINE or Cedega can handle most of those, if they are not supported natively which several of them should.

Anything else that I should know before trying FC5 beta 3 out?

I've never tried setting up SLI on any computer, Linux or otherwise, so can't advise there.

The main thing I think you would find useful, if you don't already know about it, is yum. There are many guides on how to set it up, although I'm not aware of one for FC5 since it hasn't reached stable release yet. You can get many packages through it, including mp3 support, vlc and other video players, wine and the nVidia drivers. If you want a gui you can try yumex (although I have never used it, several people have said it's good).

I must admit to being quite curious as to why you want to try out a beta version of FC but not of Suse. It is generally advised that you do not keep the beta version, but reinstall when the official release comes out, because upgrading may not work correctly (this is one of my big problems with Fedora, they advise a reinstall every time there is a new release, and old releases are not updated after a year or so).

It might be worth giving Ubuntu a shot. Apparently it is very easy to set up, it has plenty of packages available as it's a Debian derivative, and they'll even send you free CDs at https://shipit.ubuntu.com/.

Well, for one thing, Suse is a pain to install games that come on multiple discs. Suse uses a dynamic mounting method where the mount point is always different, it changes to mirror the disc name, like /media/Quake4_disc1, /media/QUake4_disc2, etc...

So you install a game, and it asks for th enext disc, you pop it in, and the mount point changes and the install script tanks because the disc is not found where it was expected to be, as the original mount point no longer exists.

Total pain in the ass, but they did it to enhance iPod and portable support.

Can't you override the CD drive mounting problem in Suse by modifying the fstab, or mounting by hand (yes, I realise this is a pain)?

Aren't you worried about ghosting on an LCD that size by the way? (seems I'm actually asking the questions here...)
I'd be interested to hear how you get on with this though, one of the main things that keeps me from ditching Windows is the trouble with getting games running.

Ghosting on an LCD is largely a myth these days. Modern LCD's are being used for HDTV and computer screens, and they offer great gaming image quality and superior 2D to a CRT.

As long as it is a quality display with a low response time, it looks great.

OK, I am almost done installing FC5b3.

Couple questions on getting started:

1) How do I make sure that DMA is enabled on all drives? Is it on by default?
2) How do I install the latest NVidia drivers and enable SLI?
3) How do I install all the multimedia stuff to enable encrypted DVD playback, MP3, AVI, etc?

Anything else that you guys can point me towards in reference to "must have" apps or settings, I would be most appreciative!

Already, I am running into a wall, that might be simple for some people, but for a Windows and Suse user, seems a chore. I have a 400GB SATA drive that is formatted with ReiserFS and cannot seem to find it, mount it, etc...

I was reading Mad Penguin's review of FC5 and it seems that they have also gone down the route of mounting CDs by volume name, instead of in /media/cdrom or whatever the drive is, so you may not have escaped this problem.

As I said before, you should really set up yum. It is a very good package manager. Stanton Finley, for example, explains how to set it up for both FC3 and 4. He hasn't yet produced a guide for FC5 though. Google, or search this site, and you will find other guides to setting it up - mjmwired and fedorafaq are the ones I most often hear mentioned.

For the reiser problem, I'm guessing you didn't enable reiserFS at boot time (instead of booting the default kernel from the CD, you can use the command 'linux reiserfs' to install to reiserfs instead of the default ext3, although this used to require the disabling of SElinux), so you will need to install the reiser tools. This used to be possible with yum by issuing the command 'yum install reiserfs-utils'. If the whole drive isn't appearing, I guess it's possible that your SATA controller isn't supported by your current kernel, since it's obviously a very recent computer. I had this problem with my most recent computer, and had to give up on putting Linux on it because trying to fix it was far too much effort.

To install the nVidia drivers and multimedia stuff, you would normally do this by configuring external repositories and using yum. Since FC5 isn't yet on full release, I'm really not sure if the external repositories have been set up. You can try searching for them. Otherwise you'll have to install these things by hand, by downloading from the website and compiling them yourself, I guess. Googling "linux sli" may help you find some guides.

In case you are wondering (you may already know this), Fedora doesn't include any of this stuff by default for copyright/legal reasons. This is why the packages are not available on their default repositories and you need to add external ones. It is also one of the major complaints often make about Fedora, it doesn't have mp3, DVD, ntfs etc support by default.

A note of caution. I recently updated my kernel in FC4 from 2.6.14 to 2.6.15 and DID NOT install the nVidia modules for that kernel first (which they advise you to do.) After installing the kernel, I downloaded and installed the nVidia modules. On reboot, it crashed and couldn't be used. I had to uninstall the kernel and revert back to the 2.6.14 kernel.

I plan on doing a clean install of FC5 when the final release comes out, so I won't update the kernel until then. Just thought I would alert you to the trouble I had.

Bob