OpenSUSE, Anyone?

[Roger Oberholtzer]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 13:48 -0500, Net Llama! wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 10:06 -0700, Aaron Grewell wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 10:25 -0500, Net Llama! wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Aaron Grewell wrote:
> > > > > On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 23:02 -0400, Kurt Wall wrote:
> > > > > > Anyone out there playing with OpenSUSE? I've order the 10.0 release
> > > > > > and have been playing with 10.1 for x86_64. Not bad.
> > > > >
> > > > > I'm going to give it a shot soon on my AMD64 box.  Neither Ubuntu Hoary
> > > > > nor Suse 9.3 would work properly with my hardware, so we'll see.
> > > >
> > > > What exactly is your hardware, and what kind of problems were you hitting?
> > > > I'm just curious.
> > >
> > > I've got an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI board with an AMD64 3500+ chip.
> > > The video card is an NVidia 6600GT PCIe.  I've got a 250GB SATA drive
> > > and a DVD burner in there as well.  Suse 9.3 would install but would not
> > > boot, it just hung.  Ubuntu booted OK but I had a lot of app crashes and
> > > general instability.  Both were 64-bit distros, so I was tempted to use
> > > a 32-bit version and see what happened but it seemed like a waste of a
> > > 64-bit chip.  WinXP 32 works fine, and since this box is mostly used for
> > > gaming I haven't taken the time to dig into the issues.  Given a custom
> > > kernel I'm sure Suse would have booted OK.  The app issues in Ubuntu
> > > were also probably not unfixable I just got lazy and decided to wait
> > > until the 64-bit distributions stabilized a bit.  I think all this easy
> > > distribution stuff has spoiled me, I don't expect to have to fight with
> > > hardware anymore. :)
> >
> >
> > I have had no trouble with 250 GB SATA disks with OpenSuse or Gentoo
> > 2005.1. They (4 in one box) even worked fine as a logical volume. How
> > are the SATA set in the BIOS? I use mine as JBOD, not RAID of any sort.
> 
> It would depend on the type of controller.  NVIDIA's SATA controller has
> RAID support (albeit limited) which is enabled/disabled in the BIOS.

The systems have RAID support (intel ICH6), but I do not want it. These
systems are booting diskless and will be storing two channels of
continuous, full resolution PAL video in JPEG2000 format. Data
collection for our image processing system. The SATA disks are hot
swappable. Not that I expect that to be used. But it means that the
disks are in handy holders for frequent replacement. I really like the
connectors on SATA disks for this. No cables or funny connections at all
in the drive bays. My 12 year old daughter could do the whole thing.

I still need to do my I/O speed checking (as mentioned in an earlier
post on a related topic). But that is after I fix my buggy video barcode
decoder code. So, back to work. 

--

Roger