Friends, I have had trouble getting my PC to work with Fedora Core 5 distro. In fact, FC5 doesnt recognize my SATA hard disk at all. Interested individuals may have a look at the following post:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...=501856&page=2

I finally managed to get my PC working in Linux by using SuSE 6.4 distro. However, I have not completely installed this distro without first having second opinions in the matter from this forum.

My question is, can I go ahead and install this distro (version 6.4, that is) and later have it updated to the latest version via the internet.

In the event, a more recent version is required to be installed, what would be the distro that I would be looking at for download -
a. PPC
b. x86
c. x86-64

My PC has the following configuration:
P4 2.66 GHz Dual Core
512 MB DDR RAM
Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 80 GB SATA HDD
ASUS Motherboard with VIA Chipset

Thanks in advance for your valued advice.

If you install SuSE 6.4 and want to update it you will need to install a newer version over again. SuSE 6.4 is what, 6 years old now? I'm surprised it has full support for SATA drives.

If you want to get the latest version of openSUSE (10.1), then you want the i686 version. PPC is for PowerPCs (Macs) and x86_64 is for 64-bit.

Thanks for explaining the acronyms.

The smooth detection of SATA-II hard drive by SuSE 6.4 has taken me by surprise as well. I am figuring out ways to get me hand on the latest version of OpenSuSE, as advised.

In the meantime, I think I shall be attempting at having Damn Small Linux detect, and eventually install on, my SATA-II hard drive.