Admiral LSD

From the description, it sounds like a kernel panic. Try flipping to console mode by holding down Ctrl and Alt then pressing the F1 key before inserting a CD and see what happens. With any luck, you'll see the exact kernel panic message and if you can describe the message to us, we may be better able to help.

The Linux kernel should handle 1Gb of RAM without any hassle, it could be SuSE have done somehting with their installation kernel that's causing your problem or it could be the lack of real support for the nForce2 memory controller. Try putting the RAM in single channel mode and seeing what happens. That brings up another important point: nForce2 is currently quite poorly supported under Linux, particularly with regard to ATi graphics cards. If you want this combination to work reasonably well I'd suggest you avoid the larger distros and instead go for something that uses a relatively clean set of kernel sources like Debian or Gentoo, despite the fact that neither are all that easy to install or use. You'll need to patch the kernel to get 3D working on your 9700 under Linux and it's going to be a lot easier if you have a kernel source tree that isn't bogged down with extraneous fluff that'll prevent the patch from taking properly.

The GTK version will look better, particularly if it uses GTK2 where it'll come under the influence of Red Hat's "Bluecurve" visual style (the only good thing and the only thing I miss about Red Hat. You can emerge Bluecurve under Gentoo but without the hacked GTK/KDE it isn't the same) but otherwise, they'll function identically.

I don't know what version of SSH you're running or what distro you're running it on but I just had a look at a Debian box I have here and in /etc/ssh is a file called ssh_config and in said file is an option that I assume is to change the port SSH listens on. I can't say for sure but my best guess would be if you opened ssh_config, uncommented and changed that setting to read Port 2222, saved the file and then restarted the SSH daemon you'll get the result you want.

Yeah, mine liked to hang shortly after sound started playing, it could be your SATA controller is doing the same thing, my 8RDA+ doesn't have SATA (which is why I bought it) so I wouldn't know.

Quote: The NForce2 network driver does not support dhcp, and dies after a while. I don't have a single problem with the nVidia network driver under Gentoo 1.4 on my 8RDA+ Quote: There is currently no AGP support in the agpgart LKM. (I understand that there is in 2.5) Patches exist for AGPGART support in both the 2.4.20 and 2.4.21 kernels. The former is provided in the latest nVidia driver pack (the .tar.gz source distribution, not the binary RPMs) and there is a link to the latter in the nForce Linux forum at nForcersHQ. I'm using the nvgart patch for 2.4.20 right now (under the aforementioned Gentoo 1.4) and it works although looking around, the 3500fps I'm getting on my 9500Pro in glxgears seems a little on the low side (I've seen 8500s get 10000 or more), I'll have to look into that. Quote: Currently, ALSA does not support the SP/DIF outputs and inputs on the onboard sound card. The NVidia driver (OSS) does though. I could have sworn I've seen some posts on nFHQ from people who claim to have SPDIF working, albeit in 2 channel mode, with the ALSA drivers. I can't confirm or deny that myself as I don't have neither digital output on my board nor a digital capable receiver/speaker system. Quote: I've not tried SMBus but I think it works with the latest CVS lmsensors. The hardware sensors on my 8RDA+ are working with the latest I2C/lm_sensors but different boards use different sensor chips so that's hardly a reliable indicator.

I haven't tried 9.1 (after my experience with 9.0, I'm not sure I want to waste my time with it) but at least 3 seperate attempts to install 9.0 resulted in (apparently) neither GNOME nor KDE being installed properly and twm being used as the default X WM all because I removed something that looked fairly unimportant (KDE support for digital cameras IIRC) and dependencies resulted in both desktop environments being removed. I'd give 9.0 a C but only because when it works, it does give the n00bs more of a chance than a lot of distro's, even if it does lump them with the worst package management system around and teach a lot of bad habits in the process.

I'd avoid anything RPM-based as a start. This includes Red Hat, Mandrake and I think SuSE, among maybe a couple of others which I can't remember right now. RPM package dependencies simply aren't worth the trouble, it's best to avoid them completely. I currently using Gentoo, which I'm liking a lot but if you don't want to spend several days seeting up your system then it's probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you want the most configurable and optimisable distro around, it's only beaten by building your own distribution from scratch. Slackware's a fairly old (it was first released in 1993 but wasn't the first packaged distribution of Linux, that went to something else and Slack was a response to it) and reliable distribution but the infrequency of releases and simple package format (no dependency checking at all for instance) make it something you wouldn't want to sit on for a lengthy period of time. Debian is also reported fairly good although I don't have all that much experience with it (something I intend to change in the near future, whenever I can get a hold of either the unstable or testing distributions). Is has strict policies on stability, security and remaining completely non-commercial but this comes at the cost of the stable distribution being reasonably behind the times, the by-product of every package going into it being thoroughly tested before being cleared for entry. It also isn't the easiest thing to install and use (which were my main reasons for avoiding it in the past but now are the main reasons for wanting to try it again, I've come a fair way in terms of Linux knowledge since I tinkered with it last and want to give it another go) but the time spent learning pays off in spades. The best advice I can probably give you though is to sample a few and see which you are most comfortable with.

I have a Western Digital WD1200JB connected to my EPoX 8RDA+ (admittedly it's on an off-board SiI680A-based PCI ATA133 controller card) and I haven't had a scerrick of trouble out of it. I did have some wierd hang issues when I first set Gentoo Linux up on it but that was traced to having ACPI and APIC enabled. Disabling both cleared it up completely. I'm hoping it'll work in 2.6 though, I could really use the IRQ rerouting IO-APIC provides as hopefully it'll get all 3 of my USB2 controllers working properly.

nVidia's nForce2 is by far the best Athlon chipset around so that should narrow things down by quite a bit. It does have integrated LAN (x2 on some boards), sound and in some cases, graphics but you won't find a better chipset without them, at least not for Athlons anyway. The new i865/i875 chipsets look pretty good but you'll be hard pressed to fit your 2500+ into a board based on either of those As for a specific board, I'm quite happy with my EPoX 8RDA+, it's pretty much unbeatable if you're looking for a board that isn't bogged down too much by integrated stuff (it has a single NIC, Sound, USB2 and Firewire along with all the usual stuff like PS/2, serial and parallel ports but it doesn't implement the second NIC nor does it have PCI SATA or integrated graphics). As far as stability goes, it's been as solid as rock for the most part, I did have a bit of trouble getting Windows XP installed and I had some old hangups in Linux until I disabled ACPI and APIC in the kernel (that was due to problems in the Linux support of said features not for any problem with the features themselves, both work flawlessly under Windows) but once I got those sorted out it's been as right as rain. If there's one drawback to nForce2 though it's that the Linux support for it is currently quite poor. nVidia provide a LAN driver (which uses closed source modules), an OSS audio driver and that's pretty much it. They recently included a patch to allow 3D Acceleration on non-nVidia cards but IO-APIC and ACPI aren't supported, Firewire apparently doesn't either, USB can be flaky and sound works, but the current drivers don't support any of the higher order functions the hardware is capable of including mixing meaning that only one sound can be played at a time without some kind of intermediate software like ARtS or esound. nVidia are supposedly working with the kernel team to get Firewire working, IO-APIC and ACPI may be supported in kernel 2.6 and with that, USB will most likely follow but it could be ages before a proper audio driver arrives, if it arrives at all. Despite that though, nForce2 is still the best the Athlon has.

Since you can boot to the command prompt, you can try configuring XFree86 manually. I'm not familiar with Linux on the Mac, but on the PC a little script called xf86config is supplied with X in order to set up the XF86Config file. You'll need to know a bit about your hardware, particularly your monitor and graphics card, but the process should be fairly self explanatary.

Quote: From what I understand there are certain releases that will overclock better then others. Make sure you get a Thoroughbred B though., Do you know you can buy a retail version for $50? Make sure it's a JIUHB (or is it JUIHB? I can't remember) core model as these are the ones that overclock really well. They don't need a lot of fiddling about either, many can reach decent overclocks using little more than stock cooling/voltages.

Quote: More audio issues This would most likely be because version 3.37 of the audio driver was included in the pack instead of the 3.39 (IIRC) revision we were promised. I can burn CD-RWs (I haven't tried CD-Rs yet mainly because I don't have any spare at present) in Nero and they seem to work alright although I did notice I can only read/write them at about a quarter of what my burner is capable of (12X Read/4X Write as opposed to the 48X Read and 12X ReWrite speeds it capable of) but I don't know whether that the media or the drivers.

Quote: You can buy a switch. Connect the DSL modem to it, then branch off the switch to each 'box'. But with that you'll need a seperate account for each machine with the broadband provider. A better alternative would be a router which (typically) uses Network Address Translation (NAT) to transparently share a single account between any number of client PCs. However, I don't think that's what is being requested. I think I have a fair idea of what is needed but I'll need further clarification of what he actually wants to do before I can say much.

Quote: Word of advice...crappy RAM will run crappy. I have Samsung 512MB DDR 333 and I have to run it at 266 Mhz for it to work. I'm buying Mushkin I knew that when I bought it but the earliest I'd be able to get some decent RAM (I have my eyes on one of the Corsair TWINX dual channel RAM kits although I'm not sure yet if I want 512Mb or 1Gb yet) is 6-8 weeks and I didn't really want to have to wait that long so I bought this as a "get up and running" solution until then.

The XP IDE drivers are supposedly FUBAR, it's all over nforcershq. I have my HDD on a seperate controller (w/ a Silicon Image Sil680 chipset) so they don't seem to be a problem but several people are having difficulties with them. edit: The audio drivers are also a couple of revisions older than what was supposed to be included, like the IDE drivers that slipped through the nVidia QA net.

I've read about proxies that can wrap mail (using a syntax such as localaddress[internetaddress]) and forward it to several local accounts using only one real email account but it's an awkward way of doing it. Much better would be altering the MX record for your domain (assuming you have one) to point to your mail server (which is what I think duhmez meant). That way you won't need a single POP account with the ISP as mail will be automatically forwarded to your server and forwarded to the correct account locally.

I just caught wind of nVidia's response to these cheating allegations: Quote: Since NVIDIA is not part in the FutureMark beta program (a program which costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in) we do not get a chance to work with Futuremark on writing the shaders like we would with a real applications developer. We don't know what they did but it looks like they have intentionally tried to create a scenario that makes our products look bad. This is obvious since our relative performance on games like Unreal Tournament 2003 and Doom3 shows that The GeForce FX 5900 is by far the fastest graphics on the market today. Two words: Cop Out. I was really hoping they'd come forward and say it was an honest mistake in their drivers or something but now it really sounds like they were trying to cheat and are now trying to deflect responsibility. I can see at least one honest use for the kinds of optimisations present in these drivers (the "cutscenes" in Doom 3) but the response doesn't mention that (or any other honest reason for them being there), instead it points the finger at Futuremark because nVidia aren't a memeber of their beta program. Given that I'd imaging nVidia would be able to come up with the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to participate out of petty cash, the whole response doesn't hold water with me.

Actually, now that I look at it, there is something odd about these drivers: The USB controllers aren't specifically identified as being USB 2.0, is this normal?

I'm running them here, nothing seems out of place, even my Radeon 9500 Pro works fine. I'm having a couple of issues though, such as not being able to boot an OS with my RAM (cheap DDR333) set to 166Mhz and not being able to install Windows XP from a slipstreamed SP1 disc (and only barely being able to install it from a non slipstreamed disc) but these aren't related to the drivers.

They should work, but you'll need to do some fiddling to get full performance out of it: http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15875

If you actually bother to try and install the drivers then there's every chance they'll work. Our friend t0nystump doesn't appear to understand the concept of "reference drivers" and got so worked up with the fact the nV drivers were released before his motherboard I don't think he even tried installing them...

http://www.rage3d.com/#1052940609 Cat 3.4 is due tomorrow, apparently.

I'm interested to see how nVidia respond to this: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1086025,00.asp I don't know what to make of it personally. On the one hand, it isn't the first time nVidia have "doctored" 3DMark results to exaggerate the performance increases of several of its driver updates but on the other hand, it might just be an honest mistake.

I'm still not entirely convinced that Doom 3 is going to be worth the outlay for a machine capable of running it. The fact that it's an id game is a big minus against it for a start as id have never really been ones to make games strong on anything other than graphics. Also, nothing I've seen or heard about it so far says it'll rise above and beyond everything they've done before so I'm left with the feeling it'll be the same graphically spectacular, but on the whole quite shallow dross they've been producing for the last ten years. I'm not looking forward to Doom 3 and I'm definitely not basing any upgrade plans on it.