On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:28:14 +0200, Hans du Plooy
I've found that the motherboard in one of our computers has leaky capacitors and needs to be replaced. I has a Socket A AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor. First, does anyone have a recommendation for the most Linux compatible board or chipset? Any VIA from the KT133A onwards runs pretty good here. If the current board is an SD-RAM setup and you don't want to buy new memory, I would strongly recommend the Gigabyte GA-7XZE revision 2.1. It's still available here and
On Thursday 10 March 2005 05:46, William H Lugg wrote: there, and still supported by Gigabyte. Mine at home is rock solid, and the cool thing is that it can handle CPUs all the way up to the 2600+ Thoroughbred, anything on a 266mhz FSB, basically. All the onboard hardware is 100% supported. Downside: for even the older Athlons, SD-RAM really is a bottleneck. The board only has USB 1.1 too.
It's really worth the money getting DDR-RAM though. The boards are cheap, and, as I just found out while shopping for more RAM for mine, it's cheaper to by a good DDR based board with 1GB DDR400, than to buy 1GB PC133 RAM. And I'm not talking cheapo stuff - top of the line ASUS/Gigabyte board with Corsair RAM in both cases.
To give you an idea of the performance difference, on my machine - 1800+ Athlon with PC-133, crunching a seti packet took 5 to 5 and a half hours on avarage. A friend of mine had a 1700+ on a nForce2 board with dual channel DDR333 (iirc). His took just under 4 hours.
Second, I am running SuSE 9.2. What should I do, if anything, to prepare the OS for the replacement? Just shut it down :-) Stuff like the chipset (which usually makes that other OS break badly) will go almost unnoticed, and for onboard sound you can just run yast. I've use a single hard disc with SUSE on that I carried around and used in various different machines. I survived some pretty intense hardware changes!
-- Kind regards Hans du Plooy SagacIT (Pty) Ltd hansdp at sagacit dot com
I have to admit that this is something I used to wonder about, changing a mobo. It's the after effect of knowing what happens with Window$ when you perform a mobo (or near enough anything else) transplant. Perhaps this should be touted more openly that Linux does not choke and curl up and die when faced with major hardware changes as opposed to M$ products. -- Take care. Kevan Farmer 34 Hill Street Cheslyn Hay Staffordshire WS6 7HR