Will my system work for gentoo linux?

spec:

p4 2.8c
abit IC7-G <-- this is the big one, it has an intel onboard gigabit ethernet and i would really really like to be able to use it.
radeon 9700 pro
2x western dightal 200 gig harddrive IDE
2x western dightal 37 gig raptor SATA harddrive
16x pionner dvd player
52x32x52x cdrom burner, its a liteon
sony floppy
2x 512meg stick of pc3500 cosair XMS memory
possiably leadterk tv tuner


hohum i belive ive listed everything. anyway most item probably will work fine in gentoo linux but the bigest one i'm worried about is the onboard gigabit ethernet, i would REALLY like to use that so i won't need to clutter up one of my PCI port with a card.

Have you successfully used any other distro on this hardware? You can always fire up the live-cd to check if the gig-a-bit works. Networking is one of the things brought up/setup during bootup of the live-cd.



Cool

allright cool thanks, if the gigabit ethernet dosen't work then i probably for 51$ can buy an PCI card no problem

the distribution doesn't really matter. it's the kernel that
matters. even if the standard kernel doesn't come with
support for what you want, youcan usually find a kernel
patch somewhere that does.

so the main patch i would need is an SATA support and SMP to support hyperthreading <-- i still think its mostly a gimmick but it can't hurt to have it running. then a few other patch and i'm in busness right, anyway i don't even need the IDE "patch" and i can have it as a module because my OS which is linux will be booting off a SATA drive anyway.

i think you're a little confused about some of the stuff you
have to do. kernel patches are source patches. patch
the source, then recompile.
the easiest thing for you to do is find some slightly "off"
kernel series, like alan cox's or one of the others that
has all the stuff you need, and compile that, instead of
trying to patch things yourself.
i thought hyperthreading was a gimmick too, but i friend
of mine at intel told me a bunch of stuff about it, and
it can make threaded apps a lot faster. i think they
got a multi threaded version of lame they compiled
running 50% faster or so.

You may have problems gettings 3D with your video card.

ATI driver support sucks, especially compared to Nvidia.

allright, anyway gentoo is an build from source distro so... it provide an prebult kernel so you can first boot up then you build your kernel and everything and copy and stuff to your harddrive then well... after that you just do emerge whatever you need to then it download/compile the code,

anyway regarding hyperthreading i'm going to have SMP enabled it probably won't provide as much boost as say having a true second cpu but atleast say maybe 5-10% can't hurt

about ATI driver support, yeah i know it suck but i belive they have precompiled drivers for atleast the 9700, and later if they do ever relase the specs for the r300 drive i probably can get the DRI stuff when they add in support for the 9700+