On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 05:27:24PM -0500, Faheem Mitha wrote: > 1) One thing I am wondering about is the "8X DVD+RW/+R, Data Only". I have > no experience with something like this in Linux. Can one burn and play > DVDs. CD-R/CD-RW's with this thing under Linux? I was wondering if it > would be better to get separate DVD (read-only drive) and CD-RW drives to > be on the safe side.
You can burn/play both DVDs, DVD+R(W)s, CDs, CD-R(W)s under Linux with that drive. It really doesn't matter if you have two separate drives; you'd just be wasting space in the case. > 2) They are also being rather coy about the ethernet card. I assume > (educated guess based on Daniel Chen's earlier message and other info) > that there is an onboard Intel card (which works with the e1000 driver), Make sure you press them regarding the e1000s. And if you use a 2.6 kernel (recommended), use at least 2.6.4-rc1. > 3) I managed to get the Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 card on a Dell Optiplex > GX270 to work under X. I could not manage to work it with the nv X driver > (as of 4.2 in testing) but the proprietary nvidia driver (ndvidia) worked. > I hope it will be the same with this "nVidia, Quadro NVS 280". Daniel > Chen's earlier Trilug message seems to confirm this. 'nv' in 4.2 does not support the GF4-family of pci ids. You'll need 4.3; Norbert provides backports for Woody from Sid for binary-i386 here: http://people.debian.org/~nobse/xfree86/ > A question: I have heard that the nvidia kernel modules are binary. How > come they seem to work with pretty much any kernel I try? Usually binary > kernel modules (in my experience) are very sensitive to the version of the > kernel being compiled against). At any rate, it seems part of the kernel > driver is actually being compiled. The documentation says You probably mean "binary-only" in place of "binary" -- Nvidia cannot provide open-source drivers (note ATI has also adopted this strategy for their fgl drivers), but they do provide a "glue" layer (which you compile per-kernel) between the binary interface (which you don't compile). > "Since the Linux kernel does not support a binary driver interface, we > provide for rebuilding these files on the target machine (or distribution) > and then linking with the binary version of the NV kernel driver." > > but I'm not sure what this means. See above statement regarding the "glue" layer. > A friend of mine said the SCSI controller on Precisions was Adaptec but > Daniel said it was LSI, which is presumably well supported by the > mptfusion kernel modules. I'd prefer Adaptec, though. _This_ particular set of computers that Intel funded has LSI, which uses the mptfusion driver. Both work. > 5) I'd welcome suggestions on changes in the configuration below to reduce > cost while impacting functionality as little as possible. [...] > Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy II with onboard 1394 ^^^^^^ Kill this option. For workstations, just use the built-in sound chipset (Intel8x0), which works just fine with ALSA. Make sure you use the latest version of ALSA, 1.0.3. > Speakers: Dell Two Piece Stereo System ^^^^^^^^^ Likewise, are these really necessary? -- Daniel T. Chen [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG key: www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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