Am I going to have a hard time finding drivers for this distrib? Can CentOS support Red Hat x.x driver versions. I'm stumpped and not sure if this distrib will be hard to work with. I appreciate any advice.

What kind of drivers are you thinking of in particular?

Also, please define what you mean by "hard to work with"... Personally, I have found Centos and cAos both to be very easy to maintain and deal with, but really that would depend on what it is that you are doing with it.

I have the Intel S875WP1-E server board (http://www.intel.com/design/servers/s875wp1-e/) and cannot find a driver for the Promise PDC20319 RAID controller.

Also, for the two NIC's:
Intel 82562ET & 82547EI

The "hard to work with" comment was describing the difficulty of finding supported hardware (and simply I'm a linux newbie).

Thanks!

Hrmm... I am very unfamiliar with the promise cards, but I can tell you that the hardware database has an entry for the:

0x105a 0x3318 "unknown" "Promise Technology, Inc.|PDC20318 (SATA150 TX4)"

The "unknown" is usually where the kernel module/driver name is listed.

The 82562ET is not exactly recognized (by name), but I would assume it is supported because the e100's are usually pretty standard.

Lastly the 82547EI is recognized:

0x8086 0x1019 "e1000" "Intel Corp.|82547EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (LOM)"

which means it should work out of the box using the e1000 driver.

Sorry, I wasn't more help with the promise hardware. Maybe support is in the kernel? Have you tried a normal installation of Centos3?

Yes, I just tried 3.1 and could not go past partition stage due to no drives being found (on Promise RAID). I tried drivers meant for RH 7.x, 8 distribs, no luck.

This board also has an Adaptec ICH5-R controller which will work for me. Will CentOS see this?

So, you're saying that CentOS will automatically find my NIC's w/o manual driver install? I'm unfamiliar with viewing and editing network properties in Linux, but your web site has lots of resources, maybe I'll find it there.

Thanks for your time and input.

I've switched to the Adaptec RAID controller (ICH5-R). Bios is configured and RAID is set to 1 mirror.

I try to install CentOS 3.1 and it hangs at "Loading ata_piix driver".

Any thoughts?

Are you in the installer at this time? What part of the boot is it in (ie. kernel still loading)?

Yes. I'm simply booting to the cd and it doesn't get past this segment. Thanks.

You may want to send an email to the mailing list... I am not that fluent with the Centos installer to provide any great advice. My guess is that this is another unsupported device (sorry for stating the painfully obvious). Maybe the next release of the installer will resolve it?