[tlug] RHEL/CentOS vs. latest hardware

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

New shiny computer arrived. 4 cores. Very quiet. As a bonus it had
on-board firewire (which wasn't in the specs), saving me moving a card
from another machine. It came in at around 95,000 yen. Motherboard is
ASUS P5K-VM, and chipset is intel G33/ICH9. Those are normally details I
don't want to know, but it turns out "ICH9" means "too modern" :-(.

You see, I decided I'd had enough of cutting myself on cutting-edge
Fedora, which always expires just when I get it working smoothly, so
downloaded the CentOS 5 DVD, which they claim will be supported until
the early 22nd century or something.

It didn't boot. Well it boots from DVD, is chugging along happily, asks
me what media to install from, I say the DVD, and it says it has no
driver for it. I say, "then what did you just read that error message
from?, stupid" and it goes into a huff and won't speak to me any more.

Some googling [1] tells me I need a custom kernel. Other googling [2]
tells me I'll probably have trouble with on-board gigabit LAN too. The
ubuntu folks also seem to be having trouble with this chipset, so it is
more a kernel than a distro issue.

I guess I'll go find the latest Fedora 7 and see if I have more luck
there. There is also an unofficial centos "5.1" [3] I could try.

For anyone else pondering a new machine, do a search on your chipset first!

Darren


[1]:
http://grokbase.com/groups/centos.org/centos/threads/2007/10/22/centos-5-0-intel-g33-p35-chipset-support-asus-p5k-vm-p5kc/M1DOl3-uFrogFaBPlJ2uG69dNiU

[2]:
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=446791

[3]:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2007-October/088104.html