I am planing to build my system with redhat 9 pro an abit nf7-s revision 2.0 mobo and 2400 or 2600 xp athlon and hopefully pc 3200 memory. Does this sound like a combination that would end up giving me tons of problems, or is there a preferred motherboard, memory, and cpu combo when it comes to using linux. I would have tried to research this info for myself but I really dont know where to start. (Thank God I Stumbbled upon this site). BTW I plan to use my system to learn programming, internet access, games, reports, math, different languages, and the occassional dvd movie.

Thanx in advance

Most motherboards now come with several chipsets on the motherboard for modem, sound, video, etc. The problems that you will have with Linux is support, or lack thereof, for these chipsets. So research all of the motherboard chipsets for Linux support before you buy the motherboard.


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Steve Stites

The NF7-S is a great motherboard, but it will most probably not work right out of the box.

- You will need the nVidia drivers for the integrated audio and network adapter. This is no biggie, and it works great if you build your own kernel.

- The sound looks great on paper but is actually pretty close to horrible (don't believe the ASIO support claims Abit makes). I decided to install my old SB Live and use that instead, but for just playing simple sounds and some mp3's the onboard audio will do.

- SATA support is still sketchy - at best - in Linux. You might not want to go with a SATA drive now. Get a "traditional" (E-)IDE drive for now. And by the way - there is no single IDE drive that can saturate a 133MB IDE bus yet so there's no need to rush to SATA (but yeah, those cables are sure much nicer!).

Håkan

Thanx you guys, this changes the whole ball game for me completely. (The ongoing search never ends.)

Just thought I would chime in here quickly. I am planning on upgrading very soon to this almost exact same system, and I would really like to know that it is possible w/o too many problems before I plunk down the change.

The reason for upgrading is that I got myself a new gforce 5600 ultra, and found that i cannot even run at 4x AGP in my old kt7a (VIA chipset, there is an entire thread somewhere here about the problems we have been having). So I figured I would get myself into a new mobo so I could take advantage of my shiny new vid card.

So, are there other users out there who have had success using the nf7s? I dont actually need the onboard LAN or audio, but if its there, why not?

Any input would be great, and much appreciated before I take the plunge.

(Nothing would burn me up more than to buy the new rig and find that I cannot use linux on it...)

TIA

ps: hw- I dont have a problem getting the required drivers up and running (i think the nvidia driver installer worked rather well for me), but were there any major problems with the other drivers for the nforce2 chipset?

No problems with the drivers here, but Linux newbies often find getting the drivers to work with Linux a nuisance.

Get a regular ATA IDED drive though, even though as SATA is supported in Linux it doesn't actually perform any better (often *much* worse) than traditional parallell drives.

Håkan

hw - thanks! im gonna go order my board this week, and i'll get back to everyone if I run into any problems. Out of curiosity, what vid card are you running, and is it running stably at 8x AGP?

In general, I'm against anything integrated on motherboards, like network, video, and sound. Mostly because they're a real pain to work around once you upgrade to better versions, like better video cards and sound cards....

I am currently using a GeForce2 GTS and it only supports AGP 4x and that works just fine. Enemy Territory runs very nicely. Looking to upgrade to a Radeon 9600Pro soon though.

Håkan

See, that was part of the problem for me. I had a geforce2pro running 4x agp no problem in my system. But then I bought a geforcefx 5600 ultra, and now it wont run any faster than 2x AGP. Almost better to put my old geforce2pro back in to run at 4x agp!

Running Mandrake on an NF7S with a Radeon 9600 Pro and it rocks!

Agree the comment about the SATA drivers, don't bother, but strongly disagree about the onboard sound. I have a superb surround speaker system and the NF7S Sound Storm is miles better than the audigy I had before.

If you get the NF7S, buy quality RAM - Im running 2 sticks of 512 Meg XMS3200 Crucial Memory which operates at 400 Mhz and doubles up on the board.

With an Athlon XP Barton 2800 clocked to hell, it has to be the best combo around.

Getting the onboard sound and ethernet to work was a breeze - I just read the posts in the excellent site.