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

[david at localcomputermart.com]

Quoting Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>:

> David Hartley <david at holistiq.com> wrote:
>
>> After installing (or attempting & failing) maybe a dozen distros, I'd been
>> about to settle with CentOS,

> 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

I have a bootable CentOS DVD which I was using..  and pored over the 
linuxmafia
SATA/RAID/IDE resources as well as Garzik's site.. even went so far as to join
the dmraid eList (now THAT is 'low traffic' ;)
Learned a lot, but not enuff (yet) to coerce full SATA/PATA support from the
ICHR6 & current CentOS (like RHEL4) distro.  No problem, glad to have made the
efforts, glad to have failed and stumbled onto SuSe, which seems more 
suited to
newbie me and my newbie client whom I built that box for.

>> 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.

Yes, I gathered that information from many sources & laboriously proved it to
myself :)
(but thanks for reiterating anyhow)
The Promise SX6000 is UN-fakeraid; is suitably old <g> and even better, has an
open source driver
http://www.promise.com.tw/support/download/download2_cht.asp?productId=86&category=All&os=100

-though I'll be using SuSe 9.3 and praying to the Computer Godz for compliance
from the SuSe 9.0 driver on the site..  Since this is all based on SCSI layer,
I don't expect a problem(?)

I may get sidetracked from this project onto the Linux on the Sun project
(e420r, 4x450MHz CPU, 4GB RAM) .. it'd be kewl if I could get the 
StorEdge A1000
10-drive disk array working..

> Cheers,              Rick Moen            rick at linuxmafia.com

Thanks for all the resources, including moral support (though I'm still not
completely won over to the PC-ness of open source..) I mean, yeah, it seems
like a good idea, but I think it'll be a while before I'll refuse to use a
proprietary driver (although that azx sound module on the Intel site for their
'bleeding edge' ICH6R's sound was total shit) hmmm..  I guess maybe if that
particular piece of dreck HAD been open-source, someone would'a fixed 
it by now
.. ?

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best,
www.davidhartley.com