[LUAU] Dealing with the Bleeding Edge

[Peter Besenbruch]

I made a mistake the other day by purchasing a motherboard with a brand 
new chipset (released in June). It is a Biostar TForce TF7025-M2. It is 
a socket AM2 board with an Nvidia 630a chipset, and integrated Nvidia 
7025 graphics. It cames with Realtek NIC and some generic, built in sound.

I like it for its support for 4 SATA devices, lots of USB ports, along 
with PS2 keyboard and mouse ports. It also accepts 4 gig. of RAM in 4 slots.

I already had Debian installed, running a 2.6.21 kernel and Nvidia 
graphics, and decided to let it handle things. It didn't. It could only 
see one hard drive. The nv graphics driver wouldn't work, either. 
Networking worked, but streaming from the machine was erratic - lots of 
dropouts, regardless of the machine connecting to it. Grabbing a 2.6.22 
kernel from sidux.com brought the second hard drive back, but network 
performance remained bad.

For fun, I tried booting other distros. Ubuntu Feisty and PCLOS 2007 
would boot, but failed to mount the very conventional, PATA DVD burner. 
Both dropped into a busybox shell within seconds of booting. Fedora 7's 
installer actually saw all the drives, so I decided, "what the heck," 
and tried it.

Everything worked, except the networking. It still had the same trouble. 
LSPCI has more occurrences of the word "unknown" than I would like (but 
that was true of Debian, as well). Eventually, I stuck in a Linksys NIC, 
and my problems went away.

The last Fedora I had dealt with was version 5. 7 looks a lot prettier. 
Debian works better with a Sidux kernel than Fedora; Samba appears to 
work with fewer issues. Fedora's desktop is a lot prettier, though. If 
they would only use APT for RPM, I would be quite satisfied. ;)

I suspect that six months from now Linux support will be a lot better.

-- 
Hawaiian Astronomical Society: http://www.hawastsoc.org
HAS Deepsky Atlas: http://www.hawastsoc.org/deepsky