for christmas im getting a new motherboard,proc,ram, and graphics card... the cdrom and hardrive and nic card will be the same, since linux checks for new hardware when it boots up will this be ok? or will i need to reinstall? i know ill have to get new drivers for my graphics card but will everything else be ok, or will i need to reinstall?


-THANKS

It's quite unlikely that this will cause a problem. One thing to remember is that if you use a graphical login, be sure to disable this before booting with an unconfigured graphics card (edit the initdefault line in /etc/inittab).

Sometimes it's easier to reinstall if you run into problems with new hardware.... but i think compiling a new kernel would also suffice.

it'll be fine, i have upgraded my gfx card, mobo, cpu and RAM on redhat and kudzu detected it easily.
the kernel will load the modules it needs to boot anyway, and redhat 9 uses a generic kernel that should boot any x86 system without loading any modules.

EDIT: as Faecal says you will need to reconfigure X

change the initdefault setting in /etc/inittab from 5 to 3, put your new graphics card in, reboot, run redhat-config-xfree86, change the initdefault back to 5 and reboot
if you're installing accelarated drivers they will need to be installed with no X server running, so instead of running redhat-config-xfree86 run the driver installer.
you may have to edit the XF86Config manually file to use your driver, if it's an nVidia card, run redhat-config-xfree86 first, then install the driver, then change the "driver" setting in your XF86Config from "nv" to "nvidia".

What kind of board? Rh 9 is up to 2.4.20, did they release a 2.4.23 for the kernel bug, anyone know? Regardless, a couple spanking new chipsets didn't have kernel support back then, or flaky kernel support and might cause a bit of a problem, mostly just the Nvidia nforce2 and nforce3, all the Intel series should be fine, same if you're just going KT400.

Cheers,

Finegan