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Hi everybody,

I'm planning to buy a new PC which should have a (soft)raid 1 disk system and a sensible 2D graphics card without fan. Due to its speed and the cool'n quiet option I got an offer about a PC with Asus K8VD, AMD64 3200+, two Maxtor Sata disks, a Plextor Premium CD-writer and an MSI GF4-MX440 graphics card. With this information I started to look for Linux support ( I want to stay with SuSE) and was quite shocked when I had to find out that this combination is very problematic:

- Sata does not work at all, neither with the Via nor with the Promise controller on the motherboard.

I've looked at the 2.6.1 kernel and it's supported there. (non raid) If you go to tyan's site, there's a driver. It's binary only alas, so you'll be stuck with the kernel that came on the DVD. (that can do non-raid and RAID 1... But not RAID0 yet)

- The graphics card is not supported.

I really doubt that.

In fact, searching on the SuSE hardware database for graphicscard with full or partial support on SuSE 9.0 AMD64 lists not one single card!

That's probably the SuSE database that's behind, not the drivers. Linux doesn't use proprietory drivers for simple 2D cards. Only 3D acceleration requires those, and then only on some (like nVidia). This shurely is no satisfying state.

Is this a problem due to binary drivers from the graphics card vendors? If yes, are there graphicscards (which you can buy now) which have an open source driver?

It might help if you said what the actual card WAS. Make, model number, etc.

So what should I do?

- Use the standard 32Bit SuSE9, will this support the hardware listed above?

Anything that works in 2D on X in 32bit should work on 64bit. (unless I'm mistaken)