Choosing a motherboard

[Matthew Gillen]

Tim Callaghan wrote:
> I'm looking to build a new system with 8GB RAM and a Q9550 CPU (quad
> core).  I'm going to use a swappable SATA hard drive so I can have the
> machine running 1 or more linux distrubutions plus various microsoft
> OSs, one at a time.  I do not want to be using virtualization as I/O
> is very important for testing in this lab environment.
> 
> My main question/concern is selecting a motherboard that will be fully
> compatible with the distributions I need to run.  I'm certainly going
> to be running Fedora Core 9, Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Red Hat and
> others.  How do I choose the motherboard so that I don't have issues
> getting the onboard USB2.0, audio, video & ethernet working?
> 
> I don't need high end graphics, I was planning on going with embedded
> video.  Functioning audio is not a requirement but a nice to have.

That makes things easier.

> Any recommendations as to where I can look on the web (the distro
> sites seems to have little if any compatibility information and most
> of it is regarding HP/Dell, not for a custom system build) or what you
> know will work would be greatly appreciated.

I think your biggest hurdle is probably SATA support.  I don't have a specific
recommendation on motherboards, but what you should do is figure out the range
of kernel versions your distros cover.  If one of them has a really old kernel
( < 2.6.9 ), you might have some issues with SATA support.  If they're all
fairly new (2.6.20+), you should be ok.

The key thing is to figure out what chipset the motherboard uses.  Then you
can (fairly) easily check for SATA support.  This document is coming up on a
year old, but it should give you a feel for what definitely /is/ supported:
 http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

Good luck,
Matt