Hi all, we are working with our favorite local PC shop to build at least three new PCs for our mini lab which will run OpenSUSE and act as general purpose desktops.
Could anyone recommend a good Linux-friendly motherboard which is well supported by OpenSUSE in particular? We will be using 64-bit, 8GB of RAM, and VMware workstation for occasional Win 7 or CentOS (32-bit) guest OSs. No RAID or major storage needed.
I am especially concerned about graphics and sound. We have had unpleasant time consuming problems with nVidia graphics cards, so I am wondering if on-board Intel graphics (which I understand are supported out of the box?) are a good choice? None of these PCs will be used for gaming or high-stress graphics, but we do need moderately good graphic performance for video conferencing, rendering large images, and having 3-D desktop effects would be nice.
Thanks.
I have an Intel 1156 Desktop board and an i3 540 running OpenSuSE without issues, no need to do any special driver install. I have had best luck with Gigabyte motherboards, ATI chipset and AMD CPU including the new FX line. Just finished up a build with an 8 core 4ghz machine that loaded up without issues (really fast) that is using an AMD/ATI 7750 from Gigabyte as well, not one issue with loading OpenSuSE or Fedora.
Recent Gigabyte motherboards often have Attansic (from Qualcomm, Atheros or some other merger) chip. There is no driver for it in opensuse 12.2 and 12.3. But installation of the Attansic driver is relatively simple and was described in this Forum.
The Attansic driver seems to become increasingly often needed, as the chip is used in many new motherboards.
I don’t know an easy way to find what a motherboard’s chips are before holding one. In addition, sometimes the same model can come with different chips.
Don’t buy Gigabyte Z77X-D3H since it contains Attansic chip (but otherwise is ok).
I suggest begin with purchasing one motherboard.
Have a look at ITX motherboards - they are small and have everything on the mb you need. Mine has USB3, USB2, network, HDMI and 7.1 sound. The graphics are integrated on the CPU - mine is an AMD. The graphics are fast and work perfect with Linux and Win7. I built mine only for Linux (which I am using for this) and I have another with Win7. You can build one with mb, memory, CPU for around $300.lol!