I've been trying on and off for a while, and without luck, to install Linux on one of my "test lab" machines. These machines have quad-core Intel processors on Asus P5K SE motherboards, which feature a Marvell PATA IDE controller. I'd tried a good number of distributions including the latest RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva releases but none of them would recognize the CD/DVD drive during installation. I did eventually manage to install Fedora 7 over the network but applications kept crashing due to kernel panics. After some research it seems that the Linux Kernel needed updating to support this motherboard and its chipset.

This morning I downloaded Fedora 8 Test 2, which was released about a week ago and the install ran absolutely smoothly and I saw it specifically load a "pata_marvell" driver, which was reassuring.

The only problem now is that the final release of FC8 is still about six weeks away so I just hope this test release is stable enough for my needs.

Labels: hardware, linux