[CentOS] core 2 duo motherboards and centos 4

[Ben Mohilef]

> from my googling around, it doesn't look there is a single motherboard 
> that supports core 2 duo and works without patches or tweaks.  is that 
> true?  the main thing we want is:
> 
> core 2 duo support
> 4g of 800mhz (or better) ram
> sata
> gig ether with pxe boot
> 

My Asus P5B "Deluxe" worked out of the box with Centos 4.4. I used a 
SATA CDROM  to load Centos 4.4 x86_64. The only "tweak" I did was load 
the nvidia drivers for the graphics card (the built in linux drivers work but 
are not very good, but that's true on all nvidias irrespective of 
motherboard). The skge driver for nic1 (the second one) works great. PATA 
will have to wait until RHEL (Centos) 5 comes along and I left the JMicron 
unused because there are no drivers for it yet. USB doesn't have any 
problem with the antique scanner we have plugged into it or with newer 
digital cameras and printers. Scilab and R both run very well. Scilab does 
not seem to benefit from the duo core, but R runs much faster. VMserver 
runs 32 bit windows very nicely. 

The box runs 100M ether with the linux skge driver and I do not run pxe 
boot so I do not know if Centos 4 will provide what you need.  Although the 
linux skge driver purports to be capable of Gig ether, you may have to use 
the latest from Marvell's web site to actually get to a gig. Trying to  use both 
NIC's at the same time produced erratic results with any combination of 
drivers. Microsoft's (pardon the expression) optical mouse, a very 
overpriced nvidia graphics card, 4 SATA's, SATA DVD, raid all seem 
happy. Overclocking the E6600 worked with the Corsair 800Mz memory, 
locked up randomly under load with slower memory. 4GB is all the P5B 
Deluxe will take. 

The lack of a proper driver for sensors ( I heard that an older driver sort of 
works), no PATA support, and the not-really-dual nic problem implies that 
installing RHEL4 or Centos4 is a short term measure before upgrading to 
the RHEL5 or Centos5 releases this spring. I have heard that these issues 
are all resolved in the RHEL5 beta, but have not actually tried the beta 
myself. 

Be forewarned, if you run XP on top of the VMware server, you may or may 
not have a license (validation) issue when you upgrade to VMware on 
RHEL5 (Centos5) in the spring if it sees a different platform. 

The P5B 'Lux performs well for math and engineering stuff, hasn't failed or 
hicupped yet despite a period of shaky building power. If you can get the 
pxe boot to work, it should roll out pretty well for workstations if that is your 
intended use.

Hope that helps you a little.