Hi y'all My PC died very suddenly on Sunday night (moment of silence). One can't buy Sempron processors here anymore, so yesterday I bought an Intel DG965WH motherboard with a Core Duo E6600 and 2G of RAM. I managed to get it up and running without too many problems using my previous 32bit installation (Gentoo). There were however a couple of non-critical gotchas: - The PATA IDE controller on the board is a Marvell which isn't explicitly supported by even 2.6.18. Apparently there are efforts underway by the kernel developers to get the docs. Anyway, I was lucky that my OS lives on a SCSI drive so it booted OK. Eventually I found out that adding boot parameters "all-generic-ide irqpoll" to the kernel lets it see the IDE drive where all my sound files are. hdparm says I'm getting 45 - 50 MB/sec so that should be fine. - There's only one PATA connection. Which is fine for 1x cd and 1x hard drive, except with my Antec case which has the cd and the hd very far apart :-( - I'm sure you've noticed by now that Intel made much PR mileage of the open source drivers for the onboard video adapters for these boards. Which is wonderful and all, except that right now the agpgart isn't supported in 2.6.18, and the xorg driver is in 7.1. Which is currently masked by Gentoo, and a PITA to unmask because xorg is in zillions of itty bitty modules. I don't know about xorg-7.1 availability in other distros. The sources for the up-to-date agpgart and so on are available on Intel's website (intellinuxgraphics.org) but I met a nice black screen when I tried them and I didn't feel like fighting with it anymore. So for now I'm using the vesa driver which actually works OK - very little redrawing lag when I switch desktops and so on. - I disabled the onboard soundcard and the ICE1712 is working fine so far with jack at -p64 -n2, 2.6.18 with Ingo's patches. I haven't given it any serious work to do so far though. The sound card is on a shared interrupt with the SCSI controller (Adaptec 29160) and several USB controllers. Which was a recipe for xruns on my previous board. - And of course since the machine is still using a 32 bit installation, so there's only 1 processor :-| bye John
