James, don't lose the faith man. I had the same problem w/ Mandrake 5.3
and have since replaced the sound card and modem with used parts that work
better in both windows and Mandrake than the old ones did. I had a power
supply and a CD-ROM die on me at different times and replaced those too.
Some of my hardware didn't always play nice under windows95 either. Just
try to stay w/ fairly standard parts. For a modem, I went to a USR 33.6
internal w/ jumpers and on sound card I went to a Creative Sound Blaster 16
w/ half jumpers and half PnP and the PnP was still not recognized and I set
it up manually in sndconfig. I tried three power supplies before one
worked and switched to an ATAPI compliant CD after the 1994 Panasonic w/
proprietary interface died.
If you are having trouble, but really want to try Linux just go to a local
computer store and see what used parts they have available. Make sure you
can return the item if it doesn't work in your system. See how much each
part is going to cost you and save up for a while, it is worth it.
Brian
my $0.02
>
>Well I think I am going to give up on my install of Mandrake.
>
>I cannot get it to recognize my modem or sound card.
>
>I have found out the my modem is on Com3 IRQ11 but have found no way..
>even with everyones help of finding it or configuring it.
>
>As for my sound card it is found by linux when it boots.. but it aborts
>putting it in memory because it is sharing an IRQ with another item on the
>PCI bus.. which is fine in windows but not in linux I guess..
>
>So thanks all for your help.. but this is just not hardware friendly
enough
>for my current system.
>
>I guess if I want to run Linux I am going to have to build a specific box
>with all the specific hardware able to be detected and run.
>
>James
