Avoiding Hardware Problems Altogether.......

sfschlais · n00b Joined: 23 Feb 2003 Posts: 2

I'm thinking of buiding my own box and despite the seemingly difficult installation process of Gentoo (for a noob), it looks like it'd be worth the trouble. BUT, I would rather not have to deal with the possible ADDITIONAL trouble of running into hardware incompatibility/driver problems, etc...and have to repeated bother you guys with a litany of stupid questions.

SO, does anyone know of a list (website, whatever) of hardware (video card, sound card, modem, etc.) that Gentoo works well with from the get-go? That way I can just buy 'em and have everything JUST WORK.

Thanks :wink:

gilesjuk

No website as such, but I have some tips.

First it's not so much video and sound card, but motherboard that you need to worry about. Getting your video and sound card working won't be possible if the system won't boot. So avoid motherboards with integrated peripherals, gfx, sound, ethernet.

Motherboards, stick to something fairly well known. I use an MSI KT3 Ultra2 which works fine. Cheap SiS chipset boards might be more troublesome.

Ethernet cards try:

Intel ones, 3com 3c905, RTL8139 work fine.

Video cards:

Anything Nvidia works fine, radeons too I should imagine.

Sound cards:

SBLive (for cheapness), www.alsa-project.org for more sound cards.

Note: some newer VIA IDE chipsets aren't recognised by 2.4.19 meaning you get no DMA, there's a very simple change you can do the C code to correct this, or go for a 2.4.20 kernel.

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2003 1:22 pm Post subject:

As far as modems go, the faster the better !
I use a Motorola SB4100

Installing Gentoo with a 56K modem can be done, but it will take a LOOOOOOOONG time.