Hey everyone, I'm planning on installing Maya onto my pc soon, as I will soon be studying animation in college. I've also been wanting to try out linux for a long time now and maya is probably the program that I will focus running on linux, seeing as how I have winXP home edition which is not compatible with Maya.

I was hoping I could get suggestions as to which linux distro would be best.

I'd also like to use linux for most of my daily computer activities (mp3, chat, web browsing, DVD, etc) with the exception of gaming. So I want a dual boot system.

I know that maya can run on Mandrake 10.1 however I haven't been able to get far in the installation process.

I'm using an A8N-SLI with an athlon 64 3200 and a Gb of Ram. my video card is an MSI 6600GT (I'm aware that this video card is not ideal for apps like maya but a quadroFX card is out of my league for the moment) I have two Hard drives. first is a 120Gb SATA with windows (ntfs partition) and the other is a freshly formatted 7Gb IDE hard drive (with FAT 32 partition)

I think installing with one SATA and one IDE is conflicting with the installation or I'm missing some drivers which I would have no idea how to add during an install.

Do any on you know if the 10.2 beta of mandrake support newer computer parts? like my mobo? Would Suse be a good alternative?

Thanks for your time

Edit: and could someone please explain to me how to use md5checksum?????

I'd try to get a basic install completed and then build a custom kernel from the latest sources, thats how I got support for some of my newer devices.
You will also have a few extra isues
with your video card MSI 6600GT.

You need to comment out the dri section for XF86Config.
like this
Code:

#Section "DRI"
# Group "video"
# Mode 0660
#EndSection

to get X up and running

Good Luck

Ron

i dunno about the SATA and IDE, but if you can get that problem fixed, i'd recommand MEPIS

it comes with qtParted to help partition so you could dual-boot, and it comes with plenty of fine applications for you to run.

note: MEPIS will start as a livecd, which is pretty convienent to check if your computer can handle it.