Are there any lists where I can find what hardware works with Red Hat 9.0?

My sister decided to buy a new pc, she needs it in school and she will only use it for chatting, typing documents and surfing the net. Normally I'm the one who keeps the pc's up and running at home but I won't be able to reach that one untill next summer so she decided she wanted red hat on it. And I wonder how will I know if it will work all fine?

Mainboard: ECS K7 Pro2800+
processor: AMD 1.6Ghz

sound, network and vga are all onboard (yes it's a budget pc, she's a student), cd-player and other things are all standard stuff.

I thought maybe I could take my dyne:bolic live cd to the shop and ask if I could try it to see if I get any sound and things out of it but is that any good? Maybe dyne:bolic just wont run and redhat will? The mainboard isn't anything special so maybe I'm worried for nothing but I'm the one that get's the blame if stuff wont work, and I'm not going to pay 114€ for WinXP on a 349€ pc

Any help, links or tips about how to make sure it works (without asking the shopkeeper "can I install red hat on it to make sure it works?") will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance
Roel

edit: I found this http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=217504
but i'm still not sure and I can't find anything about the mainboard

If anyone cares, the answer is yes.

Red Hat installed fine and autodetected everything but the onboard VGA

according to this page the motherboard (model M825G ) uses a VIA chipset.

I was unable to get the vga working with anything but the generic vesa driver

the specification page sais

I have the manual with all data about refresh rates and stuff

Can anybody help me getting it to work with a decent driver so I can get rid of the fixed 60Hz refresh rate?

edit: I filled in the questions form on the pcchips site a couple of days ago (5), linux was in the list so I thought to get some help from them but they never answered. I asked if there was a driver for Red Hat.

Redhat is pretty good with hardware detection and most hardware is pretty OS-neutral. Usually, if a device does not appear to be working, it's more likely due to a configuration issue than a hardware incompatibility, eg, the sound doesn't seem to work, but the cause is that the volume levels have simply been muted. I realize this does not specifically answer your question, but generally just about any distro can be safely installed on most equipment. Good luck with the project -- J.W.

Yes I'm interested if a few months late......

I'm very much the same as you - the machine has the same motherboard because the person that will use it (in this case my mother in
law who is not very interested in case mods and overclocking) She will be using a dial up connection though - have you had any problems in
getting any additional cards (such as a modem) recognised - I seem to be having some IRQ and port addressing problems. The interesting
thing is when I take out the Modem in this case a LG LM-I56N and do a

lspci | grep -i Modem

it comes up with:

0000:00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. Intel 537 [AC97 Modem] (rev80)


Have you had to do any IRQ allocation and how did you as it does not seem to be apparent when you enter the CMOS setup

Kindest regards,

Ashley

I didn't have to do anything special really, Red Hat basically detected everything but the on-board VGA. Because my sister wanted the cheapest PC possible there aren't any additional cards installed so I can't help you with that.

I think the VIA modem showing up is the on-board modem, I don't have the pc here but as far as I can remember the mother-board has an on-board modem.

If the PC is for your mother in law and you plan on installing linux on her PC I hope she can appreciate that, my sister only wanted Red Hat because I said Windows XP would cost another 107€. And after having problems setting up a VPN to her college she bought XP anyway.

Linux is great but windows is just easier. If you do install Linux maybe you should try something like Fedora Core 3, as it is newer and therefore has more hardware support. If you just want a desktop suitable for the normal (like in windows) user I'd go for mandrake. (Mandrake is by far the easiest to install distribution I used but installing new software was kinda hard in my opinion)

Hope this helps