Any obvious problems with my hardware?

[willkayakforfood]

Hello!

 

I have two hard drives on my computer. On one, I have Windows XP installed. My curiosity about Linux has caused me to want to put Mandrake on my second drive (it's a 20 GB drive).

 

This machine was custom built for me, and great care was taken to ensure there would be no hardware/driver/OS incompatibilities, and this has been very successful with regards to WinXP. Now I'm wondering...will my basic hardware setup be compatible with a Mandrake installation on the second drive?

 

I don't know if this is all the information you'd need, but for now, I'll provide a list of the hardware I have on here, and hopefully, someone will be able to tell me if they see any potential problems...

 

Motherboard: ASUS P4S533-MX w/Audio/Video/Lan

Processor: Intel Celeron 2.4 GHZ

Enlight 72500A w/300 Watt ATX

Graphics: ASUS GeForce2 MX-400 V7100 Pro 64 (64 MB video RAM)

Sound: Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1

Hard Drives:

Primary (C:\): Seagate 80 GB/7200 RPM ATA-100 (WinXP installed on this one)

Secondary (D:\): Seagate 20 GB/7200 RPM (forgot the rest of this one)

CD-ROM: Liteon 52x

CD-RW: Liteon 52/32/52

Floppy Drive: Teac 1.44 Floppy

RAM: Kingston 512 MB DDR2100

Modems:

Linksys external ethernet cable modem (connected via USB port)

AOPEN 56k V92 Analog Modem (what I'm using at the moment, because the silly cable is acting up today)

 

Looking at the above, can anyone see potential conflicts if I were to install Mandrake on my secondary hard drive?

 

Thanks!

[william]

willkayakforfood:

Be welcome to the board.

 

Give a look at here and check if your hardware setup is compatible. I hope it helps you.

 

From what I'm concerned and by my own experiences, running MDK on a Compaq Presario notebook and on a desktop Compaq EVO D510 without any sort of compatibility issue.

 

Good luck

[Ixthusdan]

Mandrake, and linux in general, is compatiple with more than what you will find on hardware lists. Most of my hardware has not specifically been om any of the lists, but it all works ok. I would look at lists for: modems, scanners, and printers. MS has many manufacturers convinced that their monopoly will last forever, so there are modems, printers, and scanners designed to work only in windows.

[bvc]

Welcome!

 

That link is useless, especially with new hardware.

 

 

I know at least a certain CD-ROM: Liteon is not detected at install with Mandrake 9.1.

 

And you can probably forget any usb modem. Some do work, some require some effort to get working....it's best to stay away from usb/modem stuff and stick with how they're intended to work. It is after all an 'ethernet' modem.

 

The best way to find out is to use advanced google searches, and within the results, detailed linux searched, and see what others are saying. Keep in mind that even though it may appear that 'many' are having probs with a particular piece of hardware, 'many' should just stick with windows. So see if there are relatively easy fixes to the common probs.

[Gowator]

The Motherboard is something to definately check, most specifically the onboard video and lan.

Apart from that Linux tends to be more forgiving overall than windows ...

 

Devices are far more generic as far as Linux is concerned. This is good and bad depending on your perspective.

I agree with bvc about the list except if it says it works then it will, but its woefully uncomplete in that far more (10x at least ) stuff works flawlessly.

 

Many manufactuers will 'copy' a hardware device to a large amount from a de facto standard based on the chipset. These just work under linux as opposed to needing a special driver for that manufactuerers implementation.

 

Mr GOOGLE and your mobo model along with linux is the best way. I could do it and post it up but for you but you mightest well have the benefit of reading it yourself.

 

The bad part is you might sometimes have to mess about to get a particular item working.

[bvc]

Also, if there are big probs to the point that it's just not worht trying right now, check again in 6-10 months. Development/bug fixes happen quickly in linux for the most part. I first tried ML-7.x? and it was hopeless on my ,at the time new pc, and 10 months later everything was supported.

[aRTee]

From what I can tell, I have the same sblive 5.1, works fine (5.1 audio, I use 4.0), and the video is what's in my wife's machine, also works fine, with the nvidia 3d (closed source) drivers).

 

The motherboard will work fine, with very new chipsets the dma will not work in some cases, often leading to choppy dvd playback.

Knowing Asus, the onboard LAN will work, on asus boards friends recently got the linux driver was even on the cd, as was the driver for the onboard audio; however, there in most cases you will only get stereo, even if it's 6 channel in windows (you can get 4 channel mirrored stereo, meaning left rear is the same as front rear. Useful that.... not.).

 

All your drives should work fine, hdds and cdrom/burners.

I have never seen a cdrom not detected on any linux install; I have seen linux install on a machine where even the bios didn't see the harddisk, and there was no way to install windows on that machine...

 

I agree with the others, the external modem via usb may be problematic.

Google is your friend, check google groups too.

 

But if your cable modem has ethernet too, connect via that.

 

Also, most (all I have seen, and likely more than 95% as far as I have heard) analogue external modems connected through serial port can work with linux, it may be not so clear as to how to configure them though.

 

All in all, I'd say, your system sounds fine for dualboot. Then sort out your problems (if any; or maybe I'm being overly optimistic... :D ) with google, this board etc. And when you find you actually don't boot to windows anymore, you may find a better use for that c:\ partition.... but that may take a year or more, and that's fine.