On 2/21/2010 5:11 PM, Peter Tenenbaum wrote:
Mark -- thanks for the information! Your explanation of IA64 vs AMD64 is about what I thought the situation was, but it never hurts to check. As far as hardware is concerned: I'm planning to use a Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 motherboard, which in turn uses the Intel P55 Express chipset, the Realtek ALC888 audio chipset, and the Realtek 8111D LAN chipset. The Realtek website has linux drivers for both chips updated in Jan and Feb of this year. For video I plan to use the Gigabyte GV-NX84S512HP, which in turn uses nVidia GeForce 8400GS; the nVidia site has 64 bit linux drivers for that chipset. Thanks again for your help on this! Let me know if you can think of anything I've missed or any other research I should do before placing an order. -PT
Realtek audio is covered. I can't speak to Realtek LAN. P55 is the very latest Intel Northbridge. I don't know if X servers or drivers yet exist for the version of it that supports the Intel GPU, but I'm sure that they will exist shortly if they don't already. Since you plan to use NVIDIA, the point is moot.
If you plan to use Debian, you will be wanting to use the Debian-packaged versions of most drivers. These are usually delayed a bit from the release of hardware OEM drivers. There are advantages and disadvantages. The exception might be that you might want to use the NVIDIA driver binary if 3D is part of your Linux life.
This itself may change with upcoming kernel releases. The NVIDIA driver has been reverse engineered, and an open source driver is coming. Of course, the open driver may always be behind the closed binary; that depends on NVIDIA, and their history is that they want it to stay closed, to compete with AMD/ATI.
I tend to prefer ASUS for consumer MBs, but the Giga-Byte board you are looking at has gotten mainly favorable reviews.
I *think* you will be okay with it from day one, but a few things may not be supported in Linux at first. I am concerned especially about that USB 3.0. If the board has some regular USB 2.0 ports, you will be able to use them, but the 3.0 ports may not work until a future kernel release. This will be true for all boards, not just that one.
Good luck! Mark Allums