What is old is always new again. I wonder if anyone else has completed what I would like to do. I have a AMD 2500+ chip on a Gigabyte Vt600 via chipset board. A gig of ram and a extra 80 gig Hd with a ATI AIW 8500 Dv card. I would like to turn it into a dvr tv recorder that I can use for the family it would be really nice to use the remote too but not necessary. I would need to have it tie into my Home MS network in order to share the recorded files. I had put in red hat many years ago when it was really buggy and Mandrake. I think I might try Ubuntu 8.1. Does this sound like this is doable with this or am I asking for linux to be too ready for prime time.I have downloaded the latest Ubuntu but have not started the install. I am open to any distro and advice that would be as painless as possible. Since I'm a old 65 I can think new again too. Thanks in advance. It would be a shame to retire this nice system only because the win-tel conspiracy says so. Thanks in advance. If no one has I will plow ahead and come back as often as needed to share victories or defeats as the case may be. Any pointers and advance warning on pitfalls would be appreciated. I am sure I will have some embarrassing moments ahead. Be gentle my mind don't work quite as fast as before.

I had an 8500 AIW. I never got everything to work. Unfortunately ATI didn't really start making good drivers for Linux until the next generation of graphic cards.

I don't think that this is so much a problem of which distribution as whether the ATI drivers for Linux will work very well. Here is the web page to get the official drivers.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...n-prer200.aspx

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...n-prer200.aspx

One page is for 32 bit Linux and the other is for 64 bit Linux. The only clues about distribution here are that the driver that you probably want to use is for X.org and that driver is in rpm format. So you want to use a distribution that has X.org v6.8 or higher and that can install rpm format software archives. That includes a lot of distributions. The rpm based distributions that come to mind are Fedora and OpenSuSE. ( fedoraproject.org and opensuse.org ) I'm running Fedora 10 on one computer now and I have run OpenSuSE in the past. I strongly dislike both distributions.

The other video functions may be available if you use this very old open source driver called GATOS.

http://gatos.sourceforge.net/

If you are like me then you probably hate to discard a working graphic card that cost $500 when it was new. Nevertheless I finally parted with mine. Getting a newer card could be a lot easier than getting the 8500 to work well under Linux.

Thanks for the feedback. Wow sounds like I have a real chore on my hands. I am hoping that since AMD is not part of the WinTel combine they might have decent support for the Linux boxes. Sorry to hear you had to give up on that good old card. I remember I bought them because the work was done on the card rather then in software. Thanks for the links I will read a bit more before embarking on this quest. All else fails I think I can set up a Xp system to do this but dont want to admit defeat yet. My fault for buying my dear wife a replacement before the end of this computers usable life. If I get it working I will post about it. I am sure I will muck things up quite a bit along the way. Thanks for the help.