help with 939chip, A8N-SLI Premium board and 6800XT SLI cards and linux

hello. i have been using linux for a little while now and i am getting more comfortable with it. my issue is finding a distro that will WORK without to much hassle with my hardware. the basica hardware is in the subject line, but here is a bit more detail for you:

AMD 939chip 3800+
2G PC3200 ram
Asus A8N-SLI Premium board
2x Nvidia 6800XT 256M vid cards in SLI configuration

that board has a SLI "chip" for lack of a better term that has to be flipped depending on if you are running cards in SLI or standard mode. i dont know if that is the issue and the default vesa or nv drivers just can not handle this or not or what.

i have tried:

SuSe 10 64bit, could not get the GUI to run no matter what
SuSe 10.1 64bit loaded the GUI but could never get the MP3, DVD, and SLI to work.
Debian 64 and 32bit (testing) could not get GUI to run and crashed hard
FC5 same results as Debian
Knoppix will run in live but only with vesa drivers
FreespireLive will not give any GUI does not see the vid cards and the nv will not work, only vesa.

so i am asking this great site if any of you have simular hardware, more to the point that MB, and have had luck getting all of the hardware working with what distro and what GUI are you using? i would prefer KDE and some form of a Debian based distro as that is what i am more familure with, but i am not opposed to differnt distros.

as for gentoo, yes i might be able to get that up and running, but i am not willing to lose my MS partitions as of right now MS is the only OS that works on my hardware. to much data there to move/lose if i screw up gentoo. also i really do not want to wait 8+ hours just to install KDE.

on my 2nd attempt getting gentoo running on a friends box we got it up to the CLI with limited hassles (needed help with fstab and grub) and it took 2+ hours just to compile/install FireFox. sorry, but with all of the software i want running on my computer i am not willing to wait 2 weeks and do not have the time to baby site my computer for that long to do something i can do with debian and have it up and running in less time.

after about 6hrs on the install of gentoo, we started over with debian. in less then 2hrs i had his box up and running 100% with debian stable to include MP3, DVD, java, full GUI, etc.. up and running.

so please do not offer gentoo, just not willing to put that much effort into something that should take hours not weeks.

I have the standard board, works flawlessly on a single card.

You haven't tried arch linux, i'm of the opinion that anything can work with it, it has a great wiki, did you try the proprietry Nvidia drivers? not the standard Xorg nv ones

only in a few distros could i even get to the point were linux was stable enough to install the nvidia drivers. sadly on FC and debian the computer was so slow or just unstable that i could do NOTHING even in the CLI.

anyone using this board with SLI?

I had no problem installing FC4 on my board with a single 7900GTX. I wonder if the SLI combination is the thing causing the trouble. "X" works great. I was even doing some opengl based application development and everything worked fine.

Try installing FC using just a single video card, at least that way you can begin to isolate what may be going on.

im trying to avoid pulling one card. to do that on my rig not only do i have to disconnect the 2 cards, but i have to pull both cards, flip a chip onboard (SLI chip), then reinstall the 1 card.

bit of work and runs the risk of mucking around with the SLI chip, board, and 2 vid cards.

thats the reason i have not been mucking around with it on that side of things.

so no one is using this type of rig with SLI?

does SLI even work in linux without jumping through a million hoops?

so no one around here is running SLI in linux?

am i the only nut crazy enough to try to get SLI and DC CPUs running in linux?

Well without you being willing to trouble shoot the error by using it on one card (and seeing if system stability improves)it's a tad difficult to reccomend solutions.

You say the GUI doesnt work, presumably you get error messages?

no error just comes up with a bad set of green or grey lines real tight together. or will not load at all. then it gives errors, but its been over a month since i had that and do not remember what the error was.

Well as stated as above I think your best solution is to tough it out and muck with the sli settings and try to load linux under 1 video card. Otherwise resintall linux with the current setup endure the color glitches and post a copy of the error you ARE getting once past that stage as you mentioned. Without more information there is little more anyone can do. Good luck!

ok thanks. waiting until Dec when Debian releases its full 64bit distro. ill try again then with this rig. until then it will stay stuck running XP for now.

still have 4 other Linux boxes in the house *grins*