Recent travels 10-05

 From suse-9.2 to debian-sarge in search of best support for my system.
Soyo KT600 Dragon Ultra with - amd2800 512mb-ram -
VIA-VT6420 and Sil3112 SATA , Plextor, PX-716SA DVD-R/W (serial ATA dvd-recorder), Hatachi 80Gig SATA
ATI Radeon 7500 A AIW,(capture support)
2 IDE hard drives - maxtor 10 Gig and maxtor 20 Gig Soundcard - SB Live! EMU10k1.
NIC - NetXtreme Gigabyte Ethernet BCM5705
Soyo SB-P41P Sigma Box USB card reader with Two, 1394 Firewire Ports, and bios clear button.

 Now Ubuntu - I Like it - hw detection found my Plextor PX-716SA on the Sil3112 controler before I even knew it. I almost fell out of my chair with glee .
And that was only with the Live CD Ubuntu version 5.1. The 2.6.12 kernel seems to have much better support for serial ATA ATAPI devices.

I can finely relax now right ? Noooo
I need working capture support for ATI Radeon RV200 Q [Radeon 7500] TV/capture/S-Video connectors.
Ubuntu recomends the flgrx driver for all ATI cards. That sounds like a good idea so long as it
pertains to *ALL ATI cards including from 7200 or so.
Since I have the Ubuntu Live CD version with persistant hd-partition, I will give a try to the fglrx driver solution. More comment on this later I suppose.
ATI cards used to work fine with the 2.4 kernels and Gato's drivers but got lost in the recent development stages of the 2.6 kernel.
The 2.6 kernel also dropped support for the BCM5705
NetXtreme Gigabyte Ethernet card TG3 driver but seems to be back in the Ubuntu 2.6.10 and 2.6.12 .

 Ubuntu corectly detected my Lexmark X63 usb-printer
A good thing it's the printer/fax/scanner/copier
model, Lexmark will probably Never give out proprietory code to help us get scanner/fax/copy software for those functions of their AIW printer series working on linux.

 What do I want to do ?

I like to Print out Sheetmusic using, lilypond suite,
Burn video/audio - DVD/CD 's, and follow progress of tools/methods regarding those, and other computer applications.
 Also would like to play with open office some more,
it's useful to some database creation, and text authoring jobs.

TTYL

JWM