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I had a computer go down recently so managed to get planning permission for new bits. I got an Athlon II 3600 with DDR3 RAM, new mother board and a nice big disc. I had some minor problems (only 1 ps2 socket so had to buy a USB mouse) but then came the hard work. I installed my usual Mepis distro.... which didn't work! I tried PCLinuxOS, and Linux Mint, all of which didn't work, which in the end turned out to be a problem with the distros handling the Raydeon ATA graphics embedded in the motherboard. I installed a spare Nvidea graphics card and my problems were over. I guess I knew about ATA problems before but I didn't give it a thought as they hadn't been my problems. I think there is going to be support for Raydeon in version 30 of the kernel and I will give it another try then meanwhile a couple of things from this excercise may be useful. The Mepis distro is essentially a 1 man band, a guy called Warren Woodford. It has given me good service over the years but he now seems to be more interested in turning the distro into a business and with the result that service for personnal use is getting decidedly flakey. I have been contemplating a move for a while. I couldn't get the Mint distro to find my ethernet connection. It seems to hide the basic workings in the gui and I couldn't be bothered to hunt them down. I also am not an admirer of Ubuntu as a user (but contrarily an admirer of Mark Shuttleworth). (Mint is Ubuntu derivative) I've installed PCLinuxOS for a friend and she's had it running happily for a couple of years so I went with this. Everything went smoothly and I was able to setup my network easily from the gui (fixed addresses for my 2 computers networked on NFS) so I may stick with it. I'll see how Unison and Virtual Box goes. If I hadn't had 2 computers so that I could get info I would have been stuffed. Don't knock it when some poor sod with Windows on his only computer can't get Linux working. OK, OK, I could have installed Debian and closeted myself away for a month to get it working, but perhaps next week, eh? George -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html