Tim Hanson wrote:
I've got an athlon 1.1 system (obviously a few years old), and I think that the ASUS motherboard is on the way out.
I've use SuSE 9.3.
Is there anything in the way of motherboards that I should really avoid?
Is there any performance (or other) problem if I have one HD on the IDE bus and a new one on SATA? Would that arrangement confuse YaST?
If I was GOING to go with one drive on each interface (haven't tried it yet, haven't got the board yet... just asking), is there a preferred distribution of the filesystem? That is, between two such drives, where should /root, /var, /usr, /home and swap go? Or would it make no difference?
I have to go along with the other person who replied to your message. Stay away from ASUS. Their support for Linux doesn't exist. In fact, when one tells a support person he is using Linux, from that moment on the rep is trying to get off the phone. Downright rude.
As far as the board is concerned, I haven't had my ONE and only ASUS board since my 32 bit days, but I recall never getting the board to see the correct processor speed, despite the supposed support for the processor. The most annoying part was that the computer froze up at times that looked to be completely random, requiring a hard reset. I was always doing a reiserfsck --rebuild-tree on the drives.
Computers can lock up for a lot of reasons, but my problem disappeared the day I trashed the ASUS board and installed a Gigabyte. Since then I've moved to 64 bits on two desktops, Gigabyte boards, and nary a problem.
I had problems getting my Asus board to run with Kingston memory, it would get so far in boot then lockup and at times it wouldn't boot. I googled and found a modified BIOS that allowed me to set some memory parameters, since then it's been fine. Amazingly Asus says the board supported the memory, yet their BIOS didn't. I've had 3 of these boards quit on me. I bought a cheap Asrock board for another box ( A friend reckons Asrock and Asus are the same company, just that Asrock is the cheap end), plugged in the Kingston memory and it was up and running with Mandriva LE2005. # dd if=/dev/mem bs=65535 skip=15 count=1 |strings |grep BIOS 65535 bytes (66 kB) copied, 0.001922 seconds, 34.1 MB/s ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe ACPI BIOS Rev 1013 Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG IBM COMPATIBLE 486 BIOS COPYRIGHT Phoenix Technologies, Ltd Phoenix-Award BIOS v6.00PG aXASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe ACPI BIOS Rev 1013mod_2T Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks