It's totally simple to build a PC that will run Linux - you'd almost have to go out of your way to find components that wouldn't work.

But to get something that works 100% under Linux. . that's something else. As yet, I haven't come across such a beast.

Suspend-to-RAM is frequently a problem: It usually involves a lot of work, and it's never truly reliable. I did get my PC working with ACPI, it generally took over a minute to resume, it crashed fairly often when doing so, and when I put in a new graphics card it stopped working for good.

My graphics card is an NVIDIA one, and whilst it has Linux drivers, they are of course binary and have to be downloaded separately. Same goes for many wifi cards, I gather.

So now I'm thinking about upgrading, and what with Intel releasing open-source graphics drivers and all, I'm wondering if it's today possible to build a PC that's fully and reliably supported by an out-of-the-box Linux installation: No downloading binary drivers, no hours of fine-tuning to get ACPI and WiFi working properly. Just install & go.

I'm not averse to tinkering: I usually use Gentoo, and before that I was running LFS and Slackware. But sometimes, it would be nice to test-drive a new distro and have everything working right from the start.

Has anyone managed to build a totally-supported-by-Linux PC, and if so, what were the components?

Have you tried SabayonLinux ?

No, because this isn't a distro-related question

Ok, so usually things do need configuring, but what didn't work out of the box with Ubuntu? The 'nv' Nvidia driver works out of the box. You don't actually have to download the 'nvidia' one. I don't have wifi so I don't know about that. I've also never had a problem with acpi (using Mandriva and Slackware). My hardware is fairly basic. An ATA hard drive, athlon 3000XP cpu, geforce fx5200 graphics card, and asus socket A motherboard. It's all about 2 years old.

As far as I remember Mandrake correctly set everything up, including X and acpi. I don't think Linux is quite there yet, but distros like Ubuntu seem to do a good job of working out of the box. Not the case with Slackware of course. For example X needs configuring as the vesa driver doesn't seem to work.

With Ubuntu? No suspend to ram, no 3D acceleration. Both of which are supported by the hardware.

Yes, I know you can use the nv driver to get usable 2D graphics, but the whole point of the question is whether it's possible to buy hardware that means you get ALL the functionality with just the open-source LINUX drivers.

Not SOME of the functionality with the Linux drivers, not ALL the functionality with proprietary drivers.

I'm not worried about the need to configure things in Linux: I use FVWM2 on Gentoo, that should make it fairly obvious.

I just want to know if there is such a thing yet as a PC that is 100% functional under Linux.

I know there are PCs that *mostly* work with just FOSS drivers, I know there's PCs that can be made fully-compatible if you download binary graphics drivers, ndiswrapper, and do some hacking.

But that's not the question. The question is: Is there such a thing as a perfectly-supported Linux PC yet? As far as I can tell, so far, there isn't.

On a side note, I'm impressed you've never had problems with ACPI - which mobo do you have?

My motherboard is the A7V8X-X. It's via based which has given some sound related problems. But no problems with acpi or anything else. I can only suggest looking at pre-built computers which do have Linux pre-installed. I doubt that will help much though.

I know it aint a distro question but still i say Sabayonlinux is as close as you can get to running on any modern hardware. Everything out of the box and stable too.

Technically i never had any problems with my previous and present hardware on all the distros i've used namely FC5, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, SuSE, and Sabayon. A P4 2.8/865 mobo + nVidia GeForce FX was my previous hardware.

Currently on FC6 64bit on C2D/965 mobo + nVidia Quadro FX.

Most of my machines work with Linux and FreeBSD out of the box. I use nvidia based cards and the nv driver works fine, but I always install the official nvidia drivers. I don't really use the suspend to ram stuff so can't comment much on that. As for wireless cards, Ralink RT2xxx cards have opensource drivers available from Serialmonkey. These cards are supposed to work on FreeBSD as well, but I have only tried them on Linux systems. Some distros like Ubunutu and Suse include these drivers in their distro.