I'm shopping for a new machine for my 1st Linux installation. This will be my only home PC, so I want it to be fast/capable, but I'm wondering if the latests motherboards/chipsets will be unsupported. At the momment I'm thinking of the latest offering from Shuttle (the SB61G2, with Intel 865g/ICH5 chipset) because it takes up little space, I can build a screamer, and they just look damn cool. I'm not much of a gamer, but after being in IT for 13 years .... I hate slow machines!

So .... should I avoid the latest hardware, or go with what was hot 1 year ago?

1000 thanks ...

Hi DarkDrive

I'm using a :

MSI 845 GE MAX L - mainboard

It is based around the INTEL 845 GE chipset

supports Pentium 4 , Celeron 4 including Hyperthreading
2 gig DDR 333 and much more

Its fairly new - and a fast board - it works fine under Red hat 9 and Mandrake 9.1

As a general point - it usually takes a while for the latest hardware to be supported - I'm not sure about Springdale or Canterwood yet.

As I understand it there's support in the 2.4.20-xxx kernels and above for the INTEL 845 Chipsets

How about one of these?

My guess is the Shuttle will work, at least if you have some expertise in tuning the system. I have an all-in-one 865g m/b and after a bit of effort everything is working. But if you are not reasonably confident about, say, patching a kernel, and still want everything to work, then avoid the very latest hardware unless you know for sure it works.

Sound: Is this AC 97? There is a good chance ALSA will work with the intel8x0 driver. Have look at http://www.alsa-project.org, but even if your chip is not listed there it may still work.

Video: The 865g works with the i810 driver in the 2.4.21 kernel and XFree 4.3.0. There are still issues with some features of the 865g. See http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/ for details. With a patched kernel I have framebuffer, DGA and XVideo all working, and full screen movie playback with mplayer is excellent. The X11 logfile still shows an error loading the DRI extension however.

Network: Not sure what Shuttle uses. You might have to check that one out elsewhere. My m/b works with the intel supplied e100 driver.

SATA drive? Works fine with 2.4.21 on my m/b, just like ATA, except at /dev/hde.

If you can try out the latest knoppix 3.2 live CD on a specimen, hit f2 at the splash screen and enter 'knoppix alsa' at the boot prompt (and also screen size if you have an LCD). Hopefully everything will get detected and you will have a running linux box 2 mins later.