Well,
My older PC got somewhat fried, and I replaced the mobo and accessories
with the following.

* LeadTek WinFast K7NCR18GM mobo (based on the Nvidia Nforce2 chipset
with an integrated GeForce 4 mx GPU - with a nice little SPDIF & nView
bracket for second display device (TV/Monitor))

* 512 Megs of DDR SDRAM (PC 2700 - running at 333 mhz)

* AMD Athlon XP 2600+ CPU

* A 40GB Seagate hdd (ST340014A - 7200 RPM) 

(I also bought an extra fan for the cabinet to keep things cool)

..to begin with, I started off with a MDK 9.1 install (and completed a
full install in around 12 minutes :-D)
I chose to use XFS as the file system (which really rocks - y'all should
try it out)

I installed the Nvidia video drivers - they recognised the graphics card
without any hitch.

(II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU detected as: GeForce4 MX Integrated GPU
(--) NVIDIA(0): VideoBIOS: 04.1f.00.07.00
(--) NVIDIA(0): VideoRAM: 16384 kBytes
(II) NVIDIA(0): Connected display device(s): CRT-0, TV-0
(--) NVIDIA(0): Detected TV Encoder: NVIDIA

..anyway, then after some poking around with the various hdparm options,
the best hdd data transfer rate I could get was 26-27 mbps. 

However, I could not get the integrated ethernet device to work (even
the RPM downloaded from nvidia.com did not work properly) 
The audio was also sounding terrible (with both the normal OSS drivers
and the NVIDIA drivers) - everything I played sounded like extremely low
bit rate MP3s.

I was beginning to feel a little disappointed, and then I googled a bit
and decided to upgrade to the latest 2.4x kernel - 2.4.22

Since I was using XFS, I had the patch the source of the stock kernel
downloaded from kernel.org - and downloaded the CK patchset from
http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/, which includes, among
other goodies, the XFS patchset.

I compiled and installed the new kernel, and rebooted.

Once the new kernel had booted up, just for fun, I tried out hdparm -tT
/dev/hda (without any previous tweaking), and to my utter surprise, this
time, the data transfer was around 58 mbps.

Cool!!

I downloaded the Nforce driver tarballs from nvidia.com, and compiled
and installed them. 

The ethernet device now worked fine with the DIAS connection.

Nice....

Now, the only issue left was the sound.

The nvaudio module, when loaded into the new kernel froze the whole
system  - so it was clearly not an option.

The sound with the driver provided with the kernel sounded terrible.
So I decided to try out ALSA.

I downloaded the latest ALSA drivers (0.9.8), and compiled and installed
them.

The audio output still sounded funny - it was going way too fast now.

After some RTFM, head scratching, and grepping, I modified the sound
section of /etc/modules.conf to look like this

        ###################
        ### Sound Stuff ###
        ###################

        # ALSA portion
        alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
        options snd-intel8x0 ac97_clock=47470
        # OSS/Free portion
        alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
        alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
        alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
        alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
        alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
        alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

        ## End Sound Stuff ##

Apparently the "options snd-intel8x0 ac97_clock=47470" did the trick.
..anyway, now I had become more ambitious and tried to enable the
channel for rear speakers for the sound output. 

I had not been able to do that with the drivers from nvidia, so I was
not very hopeful.
I did an urpmi alsa-utils, and fired up alsamixer. There were control
sliders for all the channels, and even for a 3D surround mode, and they
were all muted. I unmuted them - and all channels worked absolutely
perfectly. (if required the other two channels should also work
properly)

Great!!

(there are also some fancy dolby thingies that I cannot test - as I
don't have the required hw setup)

so ..now the box is chugging along nicely, with GNOME 2.4 having 8
workspaces with all kind of apps running in them. :-D

Next, I intend to play around with that extra TV Out thingy provided
with the mobo - hopefully that will also work properly.

I hear that there are some issues with USB in this mobo (probably USB
2.0  problems) - and Indra-da (Indranil Dasgupta) is struggling with
getting Apcupsd to work with an APC UPS with an USB interface.

If anyone wants my kernel .config file, please mail me offlist.

-cheers-
sdg

PS: If anyone on LIH replies to this - please CC me - I am in vacation
mode.

** Disclaimer: This has been tested only in a MDK 9.1 box. **
**  Use the information provided in this at your own risk  **


-- 
In The Beginning, there was nothing....

....which exploded.

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