I am assembling a new computer for linux. will this hardeware line up work?
 

I am planning to build a computer. I intend to use linux only. I am looking at the AMD operton 1352, which is a quad core processor. I plan to use 'ASUS m2n32 Deluxe sli' board and either nVidia or Radeon video card, and Crucial or PNY DDR2 800 ram at 2 or 4 mb. I am going to want to do video editing. I would like coments on this hardware lineup or recomendations on what you think might be best.

For the video card part, Radeon will be better.
Do you get proper BIOS updates for that board?

I think that nvidia cards are better supported under Linux than radeon.

I found in Phoronix a test of this motherboard under Linux, using Fedora core 5. They stated 2 "minor" problems, concerning the integrated wifi port and the hardware sensors.
I'd like to add that the wifi port eats 2 USB ports. I saw that it uses an audio chip from Analog Devices, used in the SoundMax integrated sound card. This sound card caused a lot of problems in the case of the the Asus P5B deluxe wifi motherboard: the soundcard company wrote that "some manufacturers" didn't implement properly the card in their motherboard, and the Asus company never agreed that something was wrong. They just issued some drivers that would solve the problem. Nevertheless not all audio problems solved. I personally had (and still have) a problem with this sound card in winxp, i.e. I have no option "stereo mix" or "what you hear", that is especially useful in web-radio casting as well as in some recording applictions. Under Linux, I tried some tests using the ALSA mixer (from Ubuntu or Fedora 8, I didn't remember exactly). It seemed to work, but I didn't do any extensive test to be sure. But the soundmax microphone that is offered with the card, is rather a bad hoax: it takes more of the tower's noise than my own voice :LOL:

Anyway, I'm afraid that Asus doesn't have anymore the quality of the past years. A lot of people would recommend Gigabyte.

Of course, this model can be quite low priced, because it is already 2+ year old.

About the RAM, I think 2 GiB is actually a minimum for a performant system. Especially for video processing, I never did it myself but it seems that this type of applications needs a lot of memory. Of course, this has to do to the software (operating system and processing software) that must use the RAM. It seems that 32bit OSs go up to something less than 4 GiB.

You can post your experiences in Linux HCL :)

Not really. Both the open source and closed source ATI drivers perform better as the specs are known. The open source reverse engineered drivers for Nvidia cards are not good enough, while the closed source drivers cause all kinds of problems...apart from being closed source.

I agree that my info is more than 1 year old. I remember that recently AMD wanted to buy ATI, and this gave hopes to the Linux community for a more Linux-friendly policy.

you might consider buying a Playstation3 and installing Linux on it.

I was in Newegg reading reviews on this motherboard the other day. It is a very common board in low priced packages(and barebones) offered by companies like tigerdirect.com and ebay stores. I guess they figure the "Asus" name alone is good enough to peddle this board. You have some terrific choices in economy boards out there but it will require some digging.

P5B deluxe wifi (for intel core 2 processors) was issued at the same time than this. It was pretty expansive initially, but a year later it was at 1/2 or 1/3 of the initial price (and disappeared soon). Both boards were designed not as a budget price solution. They have double ethernet ports, firewire X2, a lot of USB ports, wifi, RAID, many HD connections, 4 RAM sockets etc. Obviously, old stuff goes out of the market.

I think P5B is gone soon, although m2n32 remains alive. This means that this late was better that the first one. But the various tests come perhaps from the era before the quad core processors. How do it behave with the quad processors?

Thanks for your replies. I do not have any idea about getting an updated Bios. I know some are on USB flash drives. Any advice in this area will help.

Hi,

For the ASUS M2N-MX SE Plus Chapter 2, the User Guide you can do a update via the floppy, Motherboard cd, or a network install via M$ Windows.

The 'ASUS EZ Flash' is a DOS mode flash using a floppy or the MB support cd.

You would goto the ASUS website an download the BIOS update and create via the readme or the site information.

I like the 'ASUS M2N-MX SE Plus', good board for the price. I have been using Slackware 12.1 without a setup problem or running problems. The uptime should have been 90 days but we had a power outage a few weeks ago. No problem with recovery.

I've used Slam64 with no major issues. Not a lot of run time to really make a true test.

I will be trying BlueWhite64 in the near future on a similar system.

Go to the MBD manufacturers web site, do a little digging around and you'll find references to BIOS upgrades for your MBD based on the model number. Ideally, you want there to be NONE, or if there is any, no more then one upgrade, then check to see what the upgrade fixes. If it's minor stuff don't bother. If it's major, download it and follow the instructions carefully.

It's always better to do a BIOS upgrade early in a MBD's life cycle and before you're messing with the OS installation.

IMHO

As far as video goes, I just installed a Linux openSUSE distro that had no problem with my fussy Radeon card (while the XP install gave me fits with the video). Draw your own conclusions. I happened to own the card but if I was building a new computer, I'd buy something that states it's an open source or Linux ready card and I recognize the brand name.

Again, JMO.