I am thinking of upgrading the core components of my computer, namely the motherboard, memory, and CPU. Right now I have a MSI K8N Platinum/SLI, with 2 GB of OCZ memory and a Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+. I am thinking of upgrading to a Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (when the price drops), and 4 GB of some compatible memory. The MSI K8N has some kinks but in general seems to work just fine in Linux. Unlike the nVidia nForce4 SLI chipset though, the latest Intel chipsets, including the P35, have no built-in PATA, which is important as both my optical drive and my primary Linux hard drive are PATA. Which is important as the Linux kernel has a silly limitation on non-PATA drives limiting the number of usable partitions, and I like to try out lots of Linux distributions simultaneously (and on a single drive, separate from my Windows drive), so switching over to a SATA drive is not an option.

Now that you have the background, onto my questions. Does the P35 chipset in general work with Linux well? (I assume yes for that one, as Intel is good with providing OSS drivers on their chipsets from what I've heard). Do the other various components of the Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R work with Linux? And specifically, the main concern of mine, what does the GA-P35C-DS3R use to provide the PATA port, and does it have an OSS driver in the Linux kernel? Thanks.

Rainier

Be aware that the kernel (at least in Fedora) is doing away with handling pata/sata in separate manners. Drives are going from the hda/sda designation to sda/sdb designation(for both pata and sata). I do not know what the limit is for the number of usable partitions under this new format. One solution that I have used for a long time is to use drive slides (or drawers). There are a lot of small (160gb and smaller) drives available for cheap. The drawers usually run $15 each at newegg. They are available in both sata and pata versions(but not both in one drawer). Just shut down the computer, swap drawers, and reboot. It also guaranties that one os will not step on the others. For shared data one can use a drive that always stays in the computer (say sata 4).

There have been a lot of issues with 965/985 Intel chipsets and linux (these may be cleared up by now).

Good Luck
Lazlow