[techtalk] Installing Suse on new computer...need advice

[Akkana]

Nancy Corbett writes:
> 
> I am looking at buying the computer described below, and one of the guys
> at work says that I will have all kinds of problems installing Linux on it
> because of the SCSI hard drive.  Is this true?  I'm not a hardware person
> at all and have never installed Linux on a computer from the ground up

My experience has been that Linux supports SCSI very well indeed,
as does Redhat; but SuSE isn't quite as good, because you have to
know what SCSI controller you have (which usually means knowing what
chip is in it and who makes it).  For instance, I have one of those
mini-SCSI cards that came with a Jaz drive several years ago; Redhat
recognized it and auto-configured it during the install process, but
SuSE didn't recognize it, and asked me at the end of the install
to choose from a list of kernels each of which supported one SCSI
card (none of which matched my card, which calls itself an IOmega
but I think was actually made by Adaptec; which Adaptec it corresponds
to is anyone's guess).  I expect SuSE would have run just fine if I
had taken the time to research what the card really was and map it
to the short list of cards for which SuSE offered kernels.

-- 
	...Akkana       http://www.shallowsky.com