Mad Irish . net

Mandriva 2007 on Intel dg965wh

30 November -0001

Ok, so buying bleeding edge hardware is not exactly smart when you want to run a Linux box. I recently purchased a bunch of new parts, among them an Intel dg965wh motherboard, a new dual core Pentium processor, and an XFX Nvidia 7300 graphics card. I should have known better when installing Windows XP on top of this hardware was problematic, and that was *with* manufacturer provided drivers.

Installing Linux was next to impossible. I tried Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10 and even Ubunto 7.04, all with no success. I finally got Mandriva 2007 working by adding the additional parameters:

all-generic-ide pci=nommconf

To the install options. Even this though isn't enough. You have to set your BIOS drive settings to 'AHCI' from 'IDE' to even get this working. Then after the install you have to make sure to modify the lilo boot so that the above parameters are provided.

Once you do this though, you won't be able to dual boot. You need the BIOS settings on IDE to boot Windows XP, and so you'll have to monkey with the BIOS every time you reboot before you even make your operating system choice to ensure the boot process will work smoothly.

I did get Mandriva 2007 installed and working, with graphics, networking, etc. The only problem was that I couldn't get the dual head monitor configuration working with my xorg.conf. I imagine the 'nv' driver that Mandriva distributes probably isn't the latest version (although it specifies '7 series' from among the NVidia choices) so that's probably causing the problem.

Overall it's a huge pain to have to continue using Windows XP on the new hardware. It runs really fast but it annoys the hell out of me. Guess I'll have to wait for the next official Ubuntu release before I can run Linux reliably.