[GRLUG] Choice of MB - Trouble Installing

[Michael Mol]

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 3:01 AM, Greg Folkert <greg at gregfolkert.net> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2008-06-07 at 04:05 +0000, rh90p at comcast.net wrote:
>> Video is an 8X card in an 8X slot.  I'm not a complete idiot.
>>
>> ASUS says the drivers needed for the VIA and Promise are ONLY
>> available for Windows.  My experience was leading me in that
>> direction.  SuSE 9.3 seems to work except that it can't seem to deal
>> with some state the VIA and Promise controllers seem to be in.  I'm
>> not sure what is causing the kernel panic but its occuring at about
>> the point where it might be attempting to access disks.
>>
>> I was getting the impression that VIA might no be well supported
>> lately and someone else just said the same thing.  VIA used to be
>> supported back when my P3V4X was new but I had the trouble with the
>> Tyan Tiger 133 which was VIA and these are VIA.  Maybe its still in
>> the kernel but no longer included by default.  If I could get
>> something to work that I could build a kernel on I could find that
>> out.
>
> Just as a note, I've only seen two machines ever not load a modern
> Linux. Those machines being older machines that meet today's nominal
> minimum base requirements, that being 32MB of RAM and Being a Pentium
> Processor (Pentium-1) with at least a 2MB PCI video card and a 300MB
> disk (SCSI, IDE, RLL or Winchester)
>
> And both of them thar machines had some kind of funky hardware damage,
> that also prevented Windows from being loaded, but could partially
> function with 80x25 display without any video mode changing. One was
> provided to me by John-Thomas, just recently.

On my own and as part of the GRCC Computer Club PC Clinic, I saw many
machines that would hang when booting Knoppix or Ubuntu off of
CD--Usually at some point when the kernel was probing the PCI bus for
I-know-not-what.  Most of the machines we dealt with were built during
or after 2000, and the distro versions in question were whatever was
current in the span of 2004 to 2006. Perhaps one in thirty machines
would have difficulty booting an OS.

I also recall two late-90s Thinkpads whose graphics hardware worked
fine under XFree86 3.3.6, but wouldn't work at all under XFree86 4.x.
But that didn't prevent those from booting Debian, which didn't have a
graphical init screen at the time. (I haven't seen raw Debian in a few
years, so I don't know whether or not it does these days.)


-- 
:wq