I have a new Soyo CK8 Dragon Plus motherboard, and have tried to install several different distributions of Linux. Mepis loads fine. Mandrake 10.0 loads, but has a terrible buzzing noise. I was told that the buzzing is because I don't have the correct driver. Red Hat 7.2 publisher's edition loads but only to a command prompt. I entered "startx" and received an error that said something to the degree of that I needed a video driver. The CD with drivers that came with the motherboard are all for Windows. Is there any way that I can use the drivers on the CD to work with Linux. Or can I download Linux drivers to a different computer and then load them on my PC which I am hoping to use Linux on. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

you should not need any drivers, and if you needed them, then they probably don't exist.....

nforce has pretty good support under linux now, which wouldbe the main problem. everything else looks pretty generic.

generally speaking you don't download drivers for a motherboard in Linux, everything is already in the kernel far more often than not.

get an up to date distro, e.g. mandrake 10.1, and it should install just fine. if you have problem loading X, then that is likely to be a graphics card issue than anything mobo related. but you've provided no debugging output or logs for us to help you on.

This board is for the AMD64, so you hould get a hold of a distribution geared towards 64bit. So you might want to get the latest version of your distribution of choice compiled for 64bit. From what I've seen, there should be such a version available from every bigger distribution. Fedora is said to be quite nice in 64bit, since you mentioned you wanted to install RedHat 7.2. RedHat 7.2 is pretty out-dated, though it was a very fine version, you might want to get something fresher.

After having installed a current version of Linux, check what's still missing. You'll most probably need the Nforce driver from http://www.nvidia.com/ and possibly drivers for your video card.


hope that helps

I used to have a buzzing noise too, until I ran "alsamixer" from the command prompt, and muted one bar at a time, until I found out which one was making the noise, and then I left that one down low.