A7V133 motherboard with debian 2.2r3

[David Grant <dgrant3@attglobal.net>]

Hello,

I have an ASUS A7V133 motherboard.  I've been using Redhat 7.1 for a few 
months and now I am already pissed off with RPM.  (First I was pissed off 
with the RPM system, and now I am pissed off, because the rpm program itself 
is causing segmentation faults.  And now if I try to re-install rpm, I get 
some depency problems.)  Anyways, it's a mess and to keep the long story 
short, I'm switching to Debian.

I had some trouble with my ASUS A7V133 motherboard.  The VIA on-board 
controller (vt82c686b) never worked, even with the most recent kernel 
(2.4.6).  I got the on-board promise controller to work though (PDC20265).  
It works with kernel 2.4.2-2 and up.  But what about the older kernels?  I 
just ordered Debian potato 2.2r3 in the mail, and I just realized that it 
only has 2.2.19?  or something like that, which came out on March 26th, and 
the 2.4.2 came out on February 21st, and I guess the redhat 2.4.2-2 version 
came out a little after?

Anyways, I'm getting Debian in the mail in a few days, and I'm a little 
impatient.  I want to know from experience if people have been able to get 
Debian potato 2.2r3 to work "out-of-the-box" with their on-board Promise chip 
on the A7V133.  I want to read up about any tricks I might have to do in 
order to get my Debian to work.

Oh by the way, I popped in an old Corel Linux CD as well as an old Stormix 
2000 CD, which are debian-based and use a slightly older 2.4.2 kernel.  I 
couldn't get them to even see the hard drive during install.  It said I had 
to valid devices to install to.  There must be a specific point in the kernel 
lifetime where this was fixed.  Either that, or the bug is still around.

cc: to dgrant3@attglobal.net

Thanks,
D. Grant