SuSe 9.3 / Re: [conspire] s MEPIS 3.3.1 t2 Gnu / Linux

[Rick Moen]

David Hartley <david at holistiq.com> wrote:

> After installing (or attempting & failing) maybe a dozen distros, I'd been
> about to settle with CentOS, even with the incredibly bad tinny & distorted
> 'stereo' sound which bleated plaintively from the speakers due to the
> disastrous sound-driver AZX 'patch' on Intel's site, which purported to (but
> clearly does NOT) support their "IntelR High Definition Audio"

I'm very fond of the CentOS people (and know several of them
personally), and have on tap a CD set for CentOS 4, in case anyone needs
it.  (Well, I have the i386 release, but will probably grab x86_64 soonish.)

Here's the current roster:
http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/installfest/#distros

> Luckily, it was a pain in the butt getting RAID0 working, apparently
> due to RHEL using some weird implementation of LibATA -as evidenced by
> the fact that booting: kernel panic - attempted to kill Init  -upon
> attempting to boot system with ICHR6 BIOS setting of "enhanced"
> (normal, I should say-  meaning PATA and SATA support) -as opposed to
> "legacy" mode which kinda sorta mighta worked somewhat.

RHEL's kernels have always been double-plus weird, in the sense that
they pretty much maintain a separate and radically different fork of the
main tree.  However, the libata driver collection they have is _the_
libata, basically -- because libata author Jeff Garzik works for them.

I don't know enough about the enhanced-mode problem you encountered to
say much, except that you'd have wanted to use the "ahci" libata driver,
rather than the ata_piix driver that otherwise applies to ICH5/5R/6/6R.

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#intel-ich6
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#ahci

> So, now (after 3 complete re-installs of SuSe, preceded by around 4 of
> CentOS, several of RHEL4, abortive attempts with Ubuntu, FC3, & others) I
> have SuSe 9.3 (kernel 2.6.11.4) working so well on this machine that I'm
> very tempted to start actually using linux :)

Excellent!

> Prob'ly it'll be a week or two to finish gathering parts; once it's built &
> got 'SuSe Professional 9.3 AMD64' installed on it, I'll bring it around for
> tire-kicking. With any luck I'll have the Promise Supertrak6000 installed &
> functional.

Er, I'm not super-optimistic about that latter bit.  I'm guessing that
the SuperTrak series must be a brand-new fakeraid replacement for the
old FastTrak series?  Brand new inexpensive ATA RAID chipsets tend to be
bad news for Linux.  The kernel guys need a while to figure them out.

The Linux coward's approach is to stick strictly to chipsets that have
been used in retail products for at least a year.  Fortunately, the
performance is usually so good that you don't mind lagging back a
generation from the bleeding edge.

-- 
Cheers,             The genius of you Americans is that you never make 
Rick Moen           clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves 
rick at linuxmafia.com that make us wonder at the possibility that there may be 
                    something to them that we are missing. --Gamel Abdel Nasser