motherboard advice

[chuckh at hhs48.com]

Shane,

Many thanks for this rundown. I believe my support guy chose the older 
board on the theory that perhaps older ones are more likely to be Linux 
compatible, But your information will help avoid that error. I don't buy 
new computers every year (every decade maybe, but not every year) so I 
am not too keen on buying old technology if I don't have to.

Thanks,
Chuck


On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 08:32:58AM -0700, Shane wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> In general, Intel motherboards are fairly well supported
> under Linux.  The d101 has your onboard video, sound, and
> SATA which should all work fine under Linux.  That said, if
> you're purchasing a new system, why he would be
> recommending an older Intel board is beyond me.  The d101
> won't support the new Conroe chips, though they are socket
> compatable, you need a 965x chipset board for that which
> are quite cheap as far as things go.  The only danger with
> the latest intel boards such as the 975xbx (rev 304 or
> better btw) or the 965x boards is older kernel support. 
> You pretty much need a bleading edge kernel to support the
> new stuff but it's worth it imo.  The ahci sata controler
> on the boards support NCQ under Linux or atleast they will
> under 2.6.18.
> 
> But yeah, Intel is fine, avoid the Nvidia chipsets.  The
> SATA support is very basic and the ethernet driver was
> reverse engineered.  Not something I'd wanna trust a
> workstation to.  One other thing, with the newer Intel 9xx
> chipsets, the onboard HD audio is fine under Linux and you
> don't really need an additional soundcard.  Onboard audio's
> come a long way and you're now getting digital
> spdif/optical ports etc and again the Intel stuff has
> decent ALSA support.
> 
> Shane
> 
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 10:59:11AM -0400, chuckh at hhs48.com wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > I hope some of you folks who know more about current hardware stuff than 
> > I do can give me some advice about a new motherboard. I have a support 
> > guy I am talking with about building me a new system, and he is nervous 
> > about recommending a motherboard without knowing if it might be a 
> > problem for Linux. He is going to do some checking, and I promised him 
> > that I would do some too.
> > 
> > He would like to recommend an Intel D-101 motherboard, unless there are 
> > known issues for Linux. Anyone familiar with this choice? Is another 
> > motherboard a better choice?  it has been a bunch of years since I have 
> > bought a new machine  and I am no longer on top of choices.
> > 
> > Also, is there a better sound card choice than the sb-live 16 bit card 
> > that was so popular a while ago, Any experience here would be welcome 
> > too.
> > 
> > Thanks for any suggestions. 
> > 
> > Chuck
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > The Moon is Waxing Crescent (3% of Full)
> > Only 10 kinds of people: those who do binary, and those who do not.
> > But you can get a few downloads from http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> -- 
> http://www.cm.nu/~shane/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
The Moon is Waxing Crescent (3% of Full)
Only 10 kinds of people: those who do binary, and those who do not.
But you can get a few downloads from http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh