Core i5-2500k first impressions

[Rich Braun]

Jarod Wilson <jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> observed:
> I think you're failing to comprehend some of what it is that you
> actually get from "enterprise" distros.

Indeed, you're right.  Having been a long-time user of a couple of them, and
no longer am--I never quite agreed with their value proposition.

> Such as, backported support
> for new hardware. Which the vendors of said "enterprise" distros
> have access to long before you do.

I'm sure they do.  But getting it out of their labs and into yours is often a
huge hassle.

> /me glances at a socket 1155 Sandy Bridge system that has been in
> the office for at least 6 months, and runs even RHEL5's latest
> 2.6.18 kernel just fine.

The Sandy Bridge will run any old kernel.  Just to make clear the point of
this discussion thread:  maximizing use of the new hardware with the
open-source software now coming out.  The two most-popular distros will be
supporting it in the next few weeks; openSUSE has been supporting it for a
while; I'll have to leave it to others like yourself to post specific ways to
get distros like RHEL5 to do so.

By "supporting it" I don't mean booting up to a root shell prompt.  I mean 3D
graphics support with HD audio in native mode on dual monitors using the CPU
and mainboard hardware.  It's a heckuva lot snappier than my old system whose
Intel graphics never ran quite right; this new system and software driver came
up out of the box without any hassles other than the ones I noted, which are
mainly due to limited hardware vendors' support for XFree86 and (I think) a
recent direction away from X11 entirely by some in the FOSS community.

I'm not a gamer but I'll wager this is a super-nice nice gaming platform.

-rich