Firstly, this is not a real current PC. Nor a real mainline one. It's a K6 200MHz with 64 Mb of RAM, 3Gb of SCSI and a Hercules Stingray 128 video card. But Linux should work on it, right? Well, it does, after a fashion. Well, okay, there's nothing really unsupported with this PC. I had a different (and older) distro on it a few weeks ago and it seemed to install okay. I decided to remove it and put RH 7.1 on for reasons I shan't go into here.

The XFree 4 driver for the video chip on that card needs fixing. RH 7.1 insisted on trying to start the X server to install, but the driver kept failing to load properly. Eventually, I remembered the "text" option - which is now undocumented - to tell the installer to stay in text mode. And it worked.

Once I had that sorted, it was a matter of figuring out the X Server problem. X Configurator kept hanging the PC when it ran the X server to check. Eventually, I fixed that by uncommenting the Option "no_accel" line which appears to be the problem.

GNOME is my next challenge. I think it's trying to be too much like Windows and not succeeding nearly well enough. I found that WindowMaker had to be installed separately (boo! hiss!) and did that. And although you can run WindowMaker inside GNOME, I think I'll turn GNOME off completely. I don't really like it and its file manager is not up-to-date.

The next trick was to get my sound card working. Now, this I really didn't expect RH to find and figure out. It's a SoundScape Elite card, which means it could be a beast to configure. Fortunately, it's not, because it's an ISA non-PnP card and I still had the Windows INI file for it. So it was a matter of figuring out the option syntax for the module and it loaded pretty easily. I was quite surprised, actually.

And the compiler issues? RH 7.0 had some compiler issues that made news a few months back. Without really thinking about it, I ran some software (TinyFugue, actually) which I'd compiled on RH6.2 and it ran just fine. *shrug* I also installed Opera 5 okay, and found Star Office. I haven't installed that yet - I want to throw GNOME away first.

RH 7.1 seems to be okay. I've had some experience on RH7.0 and lots more on 6.2 so there wasn't any surprises really. I'd like my X Server fixed, though. That may require digging into the XFree web site. :-/

Wade.