On Thursday 04 April 2002 04:02 pm, Charles Hafslund wrote:
> I am planing on purchasing Mandrake Linux 8.1 and putting it on my AMD
> 1700+ BIOSTAR M7MIA-R board with 256megs PC2100 ram and a ATI Radeon 7500
> as a dual boot system with win2k.  I do not see any support for this board
> on mandrakes site and do not see any linux drivers for this board on
> BIOSTAR's site.  This is my first dabble into Linux so I have absolutely no
> clue as to hardware setup and support in Linux.  Has anyone else out there
> tried running Mandrake 8.1 on a BIOSTAR M7MIA-R?  Can anyone recommend a
> good board for use as a Linux machine?
>
> --Charles Hafslund

Charles:
I really don't know why your board is not on the Mandrake hardware list. I
checked the Redhat and Suse sites, too, and they do not list this
board as supported, either. Looking at the board specs, it _may_ be because
of the hardware RAID...

With one rather pricey exception, Linux and IDE hardware RAID do not get
along well. However, software RAID implementations are available in Linux and
I'm told it works quite well. All is not lost, however. IIRC, it is possible
to set up your system so that Windows continues to use the hardware RAID and
Linux can do it's thing, but it's not a trivial task.

As for other AMD boards, based on my reading of the Mandrake newbies list,
the current favorite seems to be the Soyo Dragon, but there are lots of references to Abit, Asus,
MSI, Epox, and others. Don't worry about the lack of linux motherboard and
chipset drivers -- they aren't necessary. An up-to-date BIOS is a nice thing
to have, though.

Depending on how eager you are to get into Linux, you might want to put off
buying Mandrake 8.1. Mandrake 8.2 was released several weeks ago, and it is
available for download (three CD's at over 600 mb each), and the boxed sets
should be available within two or three weeks.

A last thought: Verifiy that your modem is supported in Linux. All external
serial modems will work just fine; ISA types are usually OK; USB modems may
or may not; most PCI modems can be difficult, although a few install with no
hassle. So-called "Winmodems" won't. See linmodems.org and
www.idir.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html.

Good luck,
Carroll Grigsby

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