New machine

[sammil]

New machine on the way. And so I'll need some help/advice on OS choices. It'll be fairly new with SATA, DDR2, Prescott 3.4 and on-chip GB lan. Unfortunately I'll have to put W2KPro on a tiny partition at the beginning, then around 240GB for Linux. I'm leaning towards CentOS as the first. Will it have problems with the hardware? (MB is an ASUS P5LD2 w/ 945P) It will come without an OS - Monarch Computers in Atlanta still let you do this.

Next, and probably mainly used, will be Debian Etch.

Viewpoints?

[danieldk]

Some people seem to have successfully used that board with CentOS. The only problem seems to be the on-board gigabit NIC, but that can be used by installing this additional driver:

http://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?dId=107&pId=10

[sammil]

Thank you, Daniel. I was most apprehensive about the NIC. I've downloaded the driver to my laptop and will put it on a USB drive.

[shivandeveloper]

If you have trouble with the NIC, ASUS always includes a Linux directory in their Windows driver zip file. They don't advertise it, but it's there (or at least always used to be, I can't speak for now - go download the zip from their obnoxiously hard to navigate support site and check). And yes, their on board NICs are always hard to set up for some reason.