Well, after months of procastinating, I finally installed Red Hat 7.3 on my box. I have a Soyo Dragon Plus!, XP 1900+ and installation goes through ok even though I already have Win XP Pro and Win 98 SE installed. At the end, however, my hardware is not quite there. Specifically I'm not able to access the modem (which came with the mobo) and the imbeded sound card and I'm not sure that I can see the DVD drive even though I installed from it. I can see the CD+RW drive. Otherwise everything else seems to work.

Now, I've read that this type of installation, except for the fact that it's RH7.2, should go flawlessly.

Do you guys have tips for a Linux Newbie? I'm not a *Nix virgin though, I did work with HP-UX 9 and 10 for a few years.

Ariel,

After much screwing around I got the sound card to work with the drivers from viaarena.com. Straitforward except for finding them in the first place. DVD is now visible, just had to move some connectors around (seems the master-slave thing got either the box or Linux confused).

Two out of three on my own isn't too bad I guess. Still no modem though. I've seen other posts answered with things like "make sure sttyS2" or whichever serial port I'm using is working but no dice: dmesg reports only ttyS0 and 1, but the /dev directory contains ttyS2 and 3 too. IF I try to communicate using ttyS2 (which is the one windoze assigns to it when using XP - COM3) it just gets stuck while "activating". The others don't work either.

Anyone out there configured the Dragon Plus' modem with RH 7.3?