MISC hardware questions

[Graham Jones]

I'm considering moving my main system over to linux. and have some questions on hardware compatibility.

Does anyone forsee any potential problems with this setup?

ABIT KT7A-RAID (Highpoint RAID Controller)
AMD ATHLON 1GHz (currently o/c'd to 1.42GHz [rock solid under windows])
PNY GeForce 3 Ti 200 64Mb
Hercules Game Theatre XP sound <---- this is the bit that scares me.
MAxtor 80Gb Netgear FA-311 10/100 LAN card.
Samsung DVD-ROM SD-612
Lite-On 40x CDRW
2 generic CD readers
PS/2 Keyboard
USB Microsoft Intellimouse (with PS/2 adapter if needed)


My HDD is currently attached to the RAID channel, and I'd like to keep it that way so as to be able to run all my CD drives. Not a great issue with keeping all cd's on there but REALLY want to keep my HDD on RAID channel for speed.

Also I wouldn't mind lowering the clock speed of of my proc if necessary.

As I said it's the sound that I'm worried about. I'm not fussed about getting all the milions of ports on it working as long as i can get basic stereo MP3's out of it. The surround sound functions would be be nice but are not essential.


Hope someone has some good news for me.

/me crosses fingers


thanks

Graham Jones

[Infrastructure]

Don't know about your RAID, but sound seems to be supported by the ALSA project, check out the list for supported soundcards here:

ALSA supported soundcards (http://www.alsa-project.org/~goemon/)

and your netgear FA311 has linux drivers;

Scyld (http://www.scyld.com/network/ethercard.html)

If I remember correctly all of the 2.4 linux kernels supports the netgear FA311.

[Lorithar]

I'll verify that the 80 Gb Maxtor works quite well ... although fdisk barfs on the translation ... you can safely ignore the warning it coughs up about the cylinder count/head count etc.


Alsa's beta drivers are quite nice and do a great job of providing excellent support for sound hardware ...

[Graham Jones]

Anyone know about the Highpoint 370 RAID Chip?

[Infrastructure]

According to Highpoints own FAQ found here:

Highpoint FAQ (http://www.highpoint-tech.com/370faq.htm)

the HPT370 works with linux.

[Molecule Man]

With modern Distros, nothing should be a problem. Before you install, it would probably be a good idea to check with your distro's errata page like
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/errata.php3

With what you have, it should'nt be a problem. You might want to purchase the Mandrake box set if compiling kernel modules daunts you.

[fancypiper]

Check the Hardware Compatability Howto (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/sound.html)