Hardware w/ good compatibility

[audiophyle]

I've finally decided to take the plunge and try to put together a linux from scratch machine. I need hardware that will give me the least problems as this is already a big enough task by itself without having to troubleshoot hardware incompatibilities. I'm thinking maybe an asus motherboard w/ integrated sound, lan and nvidia nForce 2 video though I havnt decided on a model yet. Any suggestions?

[audiophyle]

anyone???

[bwkaz]

An nForce or nForce2 chipset isn't always the best idea...

LFS works great on my KT333, GF4 Ti4200, Yamaha sound, setup.

[audiophyle]

An nForce or nForce2 chipset isn't always the best idea...
howcome??

I'm trying to find a good balance between cost and compatibility.

[bwkaz]

AGP is, ATM, broken with anything other than an nVidia card (agpgart doesn't work with the nForce or nForce2). However, I have heard from people at nVidia that they've written an AGP implementation for agpgart, and given the code to the agpgart maintainer, so this may become less of an issue eventually.

There are issues with RH9 and nVidia's 1.0-0256 nForce drivers (the latest ones, for sound and LAN) that make them not compile.

The older release of the nForce audio driver was just a patch on the i810_audio driver in the kernel. It didn't support more than 2 channels, didn't support SPDIF, didn't support a lot of things. This is a bit better now (with 1.0-0256), but I'm not sure whether it works for everyone. It definitely doesn't work with RH9, as noted above, since it doesn't even compile.

I don't know for sure whether DMA-able IDE support is there or not for the nForce IDE controller. It's not included in nVidia's driver set, and you may need a very recent kernel (like 2.4.21-rc1) to get anything other than PIO (aka very slow, and very CPU-intensive) IDE access.

IMHO, nForce errs on the side of cost rather than compatibility, at least for now. Of course, if you still want to use it, knowing all of this, then go ahead, I won't stop you. But my KT333 works with just about every kernel, distro-patched or otherwise. :)

[audiophyle]

cool, what do you think about this setup?

ASUS A7V333 (its a via kt333 chipset with onboard cmedia 8738)
512MB Crucial PC2700 333MHZ DDR
Western Digital 40.0GB 7200rpm
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
MSI GEFORCE4 MX 420 64MB DDR
Realtek RTL8139


I'm pretty sure the realtek is well supported, i'm not as sure about the cmedia. Does this look like a solid system?

[bwkaz]

Doesn't look bad IMHO -- the Realtek is very well supported (use the 8139too module if possible; it's a rewrite of the original rtl8139 driver).

I'm not too sure on the sound, though. You'll probably have to screw around with it a bit, install Alsa, that type of thing. But I don't know for sure; look through the kernel options for the OSS drivers, to see if they have support for that chipset.