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Linux Distro for ABIT Hardware

Posted by Hemos on from the a-distro-for-everything dept.

roidrage writes, "It had to happen sooner or later: Linux distributions tailored for specific pieces of hardware. ABIT has announced "Gentus Linux". It's a distribution preconfigured to support Ultra DMA/66 on ABIT mobos. Now if only Creative would come out with SBLive Linux. " I'm going to be introducing a number of new distros: Pre-Coffee Distro as well as Drunken-Sysadmining Distro. Seriously, though, this is an interesting step. Are more and more folks going to issue distributions like this? What do you think?

1 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe its not so bad... by ripler · · Score: 5

    OK, at first I said "What are they thinking?!?"

    I thought, why don't they just make some RPMs since their ripping RedHat. That would keep it simple.

    Then I read their snazzy little explanation. I have an ABIT BP6 board, and I have managed to get everything working on several distributions. The only problem is that with any normal distribution, you have no initial support for the DMA/66 controller. So, if you have a system with one drive and you want to use the faster controller, you have to install it with the drive on the DMA/33 controller, and then move it to the DMA/66 controller after installing and tweaking.

    The first time I had to go through all that, it was a challenge. I had fun. Although, I'm not sure most people would agree. The second time, I didn't bother. I just bought more drives, and installed to the DMA/33 controller. I tweaked some things and put my more demanding partitions on the new drives (DMA/66).

    I like to use a different distro every few months just to keep a finger on the pulse of how linux is changing. I sure wouldn't enjoy doing an install to that machine so often if I only had one drive.

    This is not an issue of making sure something is supported in the kernel. It is supported with kernel patches, and can be with any distro. Too bad no distro thinks to put support in to their install. This must be a job for Gentus' (or whatever that name was).

    So before you guys go off slamming this, read a little of the BP6 pseudo howto and the docs to install a distro on the DMA/66 controller. Most folks wouldn't bother, and therefore wouldn't get the full benefit of the hardware they paid for.

    TheRipler

    Any grammatical errors are purely intentional.