Promise TX2Plus support?

[Cray2Mk7]

Hi all.

I have just bought myself some new hardware.

Almost everything on my aopen AK79D-400 Max main board works without a problem except for one annoying part, my main board got an onboard Promise SATA150 TX2Plus controller (no raid). I also bought a Seagate Barracuda 160GB SATA HD, this is the only HD in my PC at the moment.

I did borrow SuSE 9.0 pro and it detected my controller and continued the install without a problem, but I’m not a big fan of the latest SuSE or Mandrake.

So my question is, is there a distro today that will detect my SATA controller and install onto my HD without too much trouble?

Thanks.

[Hayl]

Hardware support is not a distro-thing, it is a kernel-thing.

So, as long as the kernel you use is the same version or higher than the one that SuSE 9 uses, then it should have support.

The best way to check is to grep for your hardware in the /Documentation directory in the kernel source code.

[Cray2Mk7]

Thanks for the response.

SuSE 9.0 uses 2.4.21-99. I downloaded Arch Linux and the latest Debian net install distro, bout with newer kernel flavors, but neither would detect the SATA controller, I’m still very new to Linux, but would that -99 indicate that this is a “custom built” kernel from SuSE? Maybe with added support for SATA?

As for checking for my hardware, I’m currently on a WinXP PC with no OS on my own with the SATA system, I just got a new main board back after discovering that the first one had a faulty BIOS.

[Hayl]

Originally posted by Cray2Mk7
Thanks for the response.

SuSE 9.0 uses 2.4.21-99. I downloaded Arch Linux and the latest Debian net install distro, bout with newer kernel flavors, but neither would detect the SATA controller, I’m still very new to Linux, but would that -99 indicate that this is a “custom built” kernel from SuSE? Maybe with added support for SATA?

As for checking for my hardware, I’m currently on a WinXP PC with no OS on my own with the SATA system, I just got a new main board back after discovering that the first one had a faulty BIOS.

nah, i doubt they added it. they may compile it in by default though - where other distros may not. it's a pretty common piece of hardware.

"detect" - debian doesn't "detect" anything automatically, and neither does arch. (more or less)

it's just a matter or modprobing the correct module(s) for the device to get it to work.

if you want an auto-detecting distro (meaning they have scripts thar probe for devices for you and load modules for you) then i suggest that you stick with RH, Mandrake, and SuSE.

other than that, debian stable uses a 2.2 kernel which won't likely have SATA, it (debian) can be installed with 2.4.x kernels though but i doubt their stock premade kernels have SATA support.

i have no idea what arch Linux has in its default kernel although their web site will tell you - as will most Linux Distribution web sites - they all mostly provice HCLs (Hardware Compatability Lists).

these types of things are easily resolved with an simple kernel recompile.

[Cray2Mk7]

Arch comes with the 2.4 & 2.6 kernel, I guess I will have to figure out which module I need and do a modprobe and see what happens.

Thanks again for clearing that up.
:)