Hi all... I've recently decided to install Linux and I've run into some problems, being the newbie I am. I tried gentoo, as I heard it is the fastest and most flexible, though not newbie friendly. ( just thought I'd give it a shot to see what I can learn). Anyways, the whole thing was a disaster. =P Heres what I'm trying to do, or was trying to do:

System:
P4 3.0
IC7-MAX3
Ram - 1gb
Radeon X800 XT

Onchip ICH5 Raid 0 Setup with WinXP install
(two WD-120JB)
Audigy Soundcard, and Pioneer DVD-+R



From my research, It seems that doing a dual boot with WinXP on my setup isn't possible with kernel 2.6.x(since 2.6.x uses different software raid and intel hasn't released many specs on the ICH5 software raid?).

If possible, I'd still like to be able to dual boot on my Raid configuration though, so if anyone knows how to do this, please help.

To try and get around this issue, I bought an external USB2.0 WD-160JB to install Gentoo on, But failed miserably probably due to my newbie-ness. I got to the point of mounting everything, compiling the kernel, setting up grub and choosing drivers. When I rebooted, the system locked... I'm assuming I compiled the kernel with incorrect options.

Perhaps I should use a different distro? Any advice would be appreciated. I don't know whats distro supports what, So I'm really confused. I program, browse, play games, and do word processing.... so please make a suggestion according to the specs and what I do. I would like to use my current raid setup but If thats not possible, I'm willing to resort to installing on my External USB HD.

My advice would be to try several distros, then choose the one that best suits your needs and preferences. Many of the most popular distros can be found here Good luck with it -- J.W.

Is Intel software raid (ICH5) Supported in kernel 2.6.x yet? or are there drivers I can use to build my own 2.6.x with ICH5 raid support?

I would love to try the different distros, but it seems my hardware makes it quite difficult to even get a distro installed the way I want it (ICH5 raid so I can dual boot windows XP and Linux)

Unfortunately I don't use raid myself, so I can't offer any meaningful advice as to whether or not it is supported by a particular kernel or not. I would expect however that the documentation for the kernel would address that.

As for trying different distros, if you want to give certain distros a tryout without actually installing anything to your hard drive, you can burn a "Live CD", which basically is a fully functional Linux installation, but which runs off the CD itself. Ordinarily, they do a great job of hardware detection, which makes it easy to evaulate whether or not it would be worth a permanent install. I'd recommend either Knoppix or Suse, both available from the site I listed in my previous post.

Good luck with it. Sorry I can't respond to the raid question -- J.W.

Thanks a ton for your replies. I think the LiveCD is probably a good idea for me at the moment. I'll keep researching the raid issue.

Just FYI - installing Gentoo as a first distro is kind of like going after the killer rabbit with a pointed stick and no holy hand grenade of Antioch. You will definitely want to look into LiveCD's, Mandrake, Fedora, SuSE, and, for the daring, Slackware for starter distros.