It seems kernels that came after or shortly after 2.6.24-29 does not support ATI's SB600 south bridge chipset that powers AMD's FX790 platform.
I've tried all recent Ubuntu variants as well as the newest OpenSUSE, FreeBSD and others. All of them fail to detect my SATA disks (because it doesn't detect the SCSI/SATA interface) and it's getting annoying now.
I can always install a module for a sound or network card. It would be different if it wasn't the hard disks.
I even tried several 'alternate ISO installs' and those found my disk during install and all went well, but it seems it couldn't just use that same driver again when the OS was supposed to boot. That would be too clever.
It appears that Ubuntu Hardy and it's forks are the last ones to operate my computer. Slackware 13.37 actually found my disks, but did not find my network interface.Sadly, I don't know much about Slackware and so I could not be bothered to figure out how to locate and install a proper driver. I've been dealing mostly with Ubuntu and it's Debian-based layout and tools.A commodity Realtek chipset from 4 years back MUST be supported in every distro. So must the SB600 chipset too!
I have installed an 8.04 based Mint version but it seems I somehow I managed to nuke all the Linux MBR's. (I am looking at you, various bootloaders that doesn't operate on the principle of least surprise).
Instead of shoveling out distros with less and less hardware support, why don't they cut down on other bloat instead? I am really excited about Puppy Linux and it's future, because it seems like this is the approach they take on it.
And so I can only boot into Windows at the moment. Oh the irony!
