Well... A while back I purchased a new video card. I was the happy owner of a ATI 9600 XT. But there was a problem: My poor ol' ancient MB (2 1/2 years old) couldn't give it the support that it needed. The card was trapped using a 4X AGP bus. So I decided that I would replace it. (I had been considering this for some time now, seeing as I didn't even have a USB 2.0 controller...) So I replaced it. The new board (A SOYO KT600 Dragon Ultra Platinum) Was wonderful. SATA, USB 2.0, the whole nine yards. But there was a problem... I wanted to upgrade my aging HDD and install a new one so as to keep my data on a non-faulty drive. So I bought a shiny new 160 GB SATA 150 HDD. Well... Turns out that I may have made a mistake by accepting a new HDD standard before it really hits the mainstream. Seems that neither Windows, nor Linux 2.4 had integrated support for its exotic VIA and silicon Image SATA controllers. This meant that for Windows, I had to configure a special external RAID controller driver. And for Linux, I have yet to find a device module.

So I figured, "Heck, I still have the old 80 GB HDD, and I can have both the SATA and the E-IDE drives connected at the same time, so why not?" This is where I discovered the second problem. Turns out that the ultra schwea gigabit Broadcom Ethernet controller is also not directly supported by SOYO on Linux. Sad for me... :(

But I know that Broadcom has their own driver available for download, so I'll spend some time later and make a pass at installing the driver into a kernel so I can install the network version of Debian.

*Sigh*

I didn't have Linux on my desktop originally anyway, so the fact that it's not on there now isn't too important, it's just kinda inconvenient since I had kinda hoped it would be. ^.^;;;



- posted by Jim The Cactus @ 3/29/2004 03:37:29 PM | Permalink | (0) Comments. Add your own!