Hi all!

Recently I thought it might be a good idea to try out Linux again. I tried several distributions, Mandrake 9.0, Lycoris Desktop/LX, and now RedHat 8.0, but all have the same problem with my computer: whenever it tries to play any sound, it freezes. The only thing that worked was with Mandrake9/KDE3, but only for a while (like 30min) before it would break. Gnome freezes right after logging in, I guess it tries to play a sound then. I tried removing my Vortex2 and using the on-board VIA AC97 sound. Same problem. The strange thing is that I didn't ever have any problems under Win2k nor BeOS.

My configuration is the following:
AMD Athlon 700MHz
EPoX 7KXA mainboard, VIA KX133 chipset (686A southbridge)
512MB RAM
ASUS V7700Deluxe Geforce2GTS
Aureal Vortex2 SQ2500 / VIA 686A AC97 codec

I really wanted to like Linux, but so far I can't use it a lot.. Any help is greatly appreciated.

What driver are you using for the video card?

How can I find that out? I didn't see the installer presenting me any choices, so it's the RedHat default NV15 video driver (whatever that is). Are there known problems with the nVidia drivers?

The KX133 chipset has problems especially with nvidia cards, next time you get a hard lock reboot into text mode and look at the XF86 log in /var/log/XFree86.0.log, if there is an X error it will be detailed near the end, also /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages could hold some clues to the problem. Another thing to do is read about the KX133 chipset in the README file that nvidia provide with their linux drivers, you might need to disable AGP to get it stable.
The file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 will tell you what video drivers are currently configured.