> 1. With a reasonably new machine, can there be issues with drivers being > available for all the hardware?
Yes. Losemodems are an eternal in the proverbial. Newfangled gigabit ethernet chips aren't always immediately supported at gigabit speed, though are at 100M, SATA can still be tricky - but I expect not more so than on the other side. Typically the problems are in the periphery though, and getting fewer - proprietory rubbish excluded. Didn't check your mobo, any LCD should be fine, internal losemodems are definitely not supported by some distros, eg Fedora, out of the box. 2 of 3 types will work automagically with SuSE (the 3rd has no $0 Linux support), however there are several different subtypes of these Losechips and not all are supported under Linux, so the auto-magic fails (this has cost me quite a few hours). You should never need to edit any config files on an up-to-scratch distro. > 2. I am sure there are many opinions on this, but a good Linux version to > start with? Ooi, why don't you ask something non-controversial, like abortion or Winston Peters or GST? > 3. Where can I get a hold of the necessary installation cds? I can cut you some SuSE DVDs, a reasonably good desktop choice. If you come with pizza and a bottle of something I might even install it for you ;) SuSE, Ubuntu and a few others have live DVDs (or only CDs), which allow you to run a functional but dead-slow system without having to install anything on your hard disk. Good for a quick look and hardware compatibility testing. > Actually I am not sure how we can even guess at whether the modem will > work from this information: > > "DYNALINK 56K INTERNAL PCI MODEM" We can certainly not, Dynalink could have soldered any chip on the market onto that card. Wouldn't even need to be the same one today as it was yesterday (and often isn't). Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
