Best Distro/kernel for my hardware?? OPINIONS WANTED ;-D
 

Hi,
Wasn't sure what forum to put this question in, hope this is ok. I'd like to know which distro and kernel combo would best take advantage of my hardware. I will mainly be using the computer for multimedia, web browsing, burning/ripping, occasional word processing and playing UT2003 and wolfenstein :-)

Here's my sys specs:
Abit KX7-333
AMD XP2000 (1666 mhz)
256 MB Crucial ram
Maxtor 40 gig ATA 133
Visiontek Ti4600
Creative SBlive platinum
Linksys NIC
Teac cd-rw
samsung dvd-rom

Really appreciate any reponses. Please feel free to give me specifics about why one kernel/distro is better suited to my needs and/or hardware.

Help the :newbie:


:confused: :rolleyes: :study:

Pretty much any current distro will work out for you.

Your video card is covered by the drivers available from Nvidia.
Your sound card is covered by the emu10k1 module.

The only thing I'd have a question on is the NIC. What model is it? I've read about problems with the LNE100TX card under Linux. Officially it's not supported. Here's a page on how to identify the card:

http://www.linksys.com/download/driv...?dlid=2&osid=7

BTW, I've got the UT2003 demo running under Slackware 8.1 and a friend of mine has it running under RedHat 7.3.

j.

please search the forum for info on peoples favoruite distributions. this is asked far far too many times each week. thanks.

I wasn't asking what peoples favorite distrubutions were... I wanted to know if any particular distro had better support for my hardware.
For instance I know the south bridge on my mobo isnt supported by most distros and would require a kernel update. Since I'm a total newb I thought I could get some feedback. :/

Your specified hardware is not uncommon. Many, many people will have Linux running happily on systems like yours (I do). The only potential problem that I have found is that sometimes RH doesn't work OK on the Athlon processors. This is easily fixed by adding noathlon to the kernel parameters, but you need to have read the info whilst installing to find this out. Other than that, I would say that pretty much any distro will work. Obviously, you should not be looking at the PPC or Sparc distros, but I would hope that would go without saying :D

Any recent distro with kernel 2.4.19 will support the southbridge on that mobo, which limits you to either redhat null, mandrake 9.0 rc2, gentoo or slackware 9.0 beta. Get mandrake if you have no linux experience otherwise go for slack or gentoo. I've got wolfenstein, ut2003, ut and q3a installed here, all going well. Make sure you get the latest nvidia linux drivers for your Ti4600.

Well if you know it's not well supportedd why don't you actaully say so, rather than sound like everyone else? If no one is given a specific reason to think otherwise, then as thymox says, your setup looks extremely normal....

Thanks you kind sir:) just the info I wanted.
I just got Mandrake 8.2 installed and was able to succesfully uprgade my kernel to 2.4.19 and get my hdd runnign at udma6 w/ hdparm :-) (actually it defaulted to that but I was able to test it).
The latest Nvidia drivers have been succesfully installed although I had to use 'IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=1' in order to 'make'.
I've got gcc version 2.96 and 3.0 on there but I still don't know how to switch em. I thought it was 'gcc -v gcc-blah' but that didn't seem to work.

I've also downloaded slackeware I and tried to install that on a different partition and was succesful, but I need a floppy to boot the kernel. I'm liking slackware more already :-)
Ques: Is there any way for me to set up Lilo to see bootable images on multiple partitions?

Thnx


I apologize for sounding like a noob.... WAIT! I am a :newbie:
I didn't know it was incompatible until someone answered a similar question on another forum.

Yes, have a look at /etc/lilo.conf, at the part that looks like,
You can have as many entries like that as you have hard drive space for the partitions, you just need to change the details. "man lilo" will give you all the details.