Building a pc for a friend who is interested in linux. I want him to have a good first experience with it, but I'm having some issues with the nforce2 board. Suse 9.2 (my first choice for him) doesn't recognize the chipset. I would load the drivers manually, but I can't read the jumpdrive without the chipset drivers.

I tried mandrake 10.0, and no usb mouse support out of box. Easily fixable, I know, but I want something that will do things with no hassle for jim. MDK10.1 was simply unusable. Would crash during updates.

Debian based seems to be out of the question (knoppix won't boot).

FC3 is out of the question (too unstable, constant updates), but fc2 is pretty stable, right? Do you think it would make a good first-time distro? Of course, then I have to find dvd codecs and mp3 codecs, but it might be worth it for a distro that works on this board.

that'd be fine. the nforce2 support should be easy enough. everythign for that will be prebuilt. any distro will work on any board though really... some just might not configure themselves quite right out of the box.

Thanks for the reply. I do know that I could get it working with any distro, but my hope is that Jim will start playing around with linux and eventually hose his drive. When that happens, I want what he re-installs to be usable, so as not to discourage him too badly.

Huh? I guess I don't thrash around enough on my Nforce2 DFI board that has an FC3 default install. Or at least it was default until it got VLC for DVD playing and Bluefish for coding. FC3 also does a great job of automounting USB drives, CF cards and DVDs. No crashes here. It got FC3 the first week it was available.

Cheers.

So your network card works without using the nvidia nforce driver/installer?

as i know kernel 2.6.4 and later has builtin network driver for nforce ethernet. it is called forcedeth.
i use fc 3 with epox nf2 board without any trouble

Default install. Lan worked before any updates. Better than when I used an e1000 on another computer that needed a driver before I could update. Don't remember which fedora/Red Hat that was.

I am presently using the 10/100 lan through my Linksys wrt54g. The wrt54g does not like the Gb lan and Linksys tells me that it will probably never work in Linux. Something about a router hardware requirement for the computer lan to negotiate the slower speed. My older Linksys 8 port router will work but I'm using the wireless for my FC3ed Centrino Toshiba laptop. he he. Doesn't matter to me. I have tried the Gb with a crossover cable connected to an Intel Gb and the xfer rates were way cool. If I ever have a Gb router or switch then maybe I'll care, but for now direct connections at Gb speeds are fine.

I also forgot to mention that i have a now old Canon S110 Digital Elph camera and it's a real pain to use the supplied usb cable to upload in WinXP. So much so that we have CF card readers for all of the Win computers. With FC3 I just plug it in, up comes a wizard and I select the directory and upload the photos with all the associated file info.

I am quite pleased with FC3. It would be nice to have media players out of the box but I think they're doing the right thing there. We should be supporting and using the Open Source codecs anyway. iRiver makes ogg players. My hard drive music is ogg. I look forward to using Theora for my videos when i get that figured out. FC3 is all that boots on the DFI and I use it more than anything else except for the laptop.

Well, I swaped mobo's and gave him an older via chipset that's easily supported. I was making progress with slackware, but it required too much tweaking (time constraints). I'll show him slackware later.

However, that nforce board is mine now. I might have to look into fc3 again. When I tried it on my laptop, it crashed hard the first day, just after updates. I was never able to boot back into the system.