ugrade motherboard bundle question

hi…

i am thinking about upgrading my 4 year old diy home built sempron 3000 desktop pc running Suse linux 11.1 with this motherboard bundle …

I have IDE HDD (no raid) and HP printer , Acer monitor,dvd writer, us robotics pci NIC agp msi nvidia 5200 graphics card …everything works fine now

BIOSTAR AM2+ PHENOM CERTIFIED SUPPORTING AM3 GF8100 MOTHERBOARD

AMD AM3 550 DUAL CORE PROCESSOR (2 X 3.1 GHZ), HEATSINK AND FAN

2GB DDR2 800 PC6400 MEMORY

NVIDIA GeForce 8100 GPU, On Board Graphic Max. Memory Share Up to 512MB(Under OS By Turbo Cache) (DX10)

Chipset NVIDIA GeForce 8100

Realtek RTL8111C - 10/100/1000 Controller

NVIDIA GeForce 8100 GPU, On Board Graphic Max. Memory Share Up to 512MB(Under OS By Turbo Cache)

Realtek ALC662 6-Channel HD Audio

Would this be compatible to use with linux ? can i just install the bundle and boot from the existing system on the hd or do i need to install new modules first .

Does anyone know of a howto with a linux user in mind for doing this ?

thanks

Hello Brunell
I’ve done a lot of “upgrades” with new boards so far (win and Linux) and found out, that it was possible to boot from the “old” HDD without installing the new drivers first. After starting up with openSuse for example, you have to install the new drivers. Mainly the drivers for your graphik-card is important.
After booting from your old HDD the driver might fall back to “vesa” and you don’t have 3D-support. So you have to install it from the NVIDIA-repository.
But I think this should not be the problem to do.
Network drivers are normally found. You did not wrote which network adapter your board has, but in most cases it is a realtek, so it should work.
As I said above, I never had problems with this. Maybe you first try 11.1, it is “older” and - to start with openSUSE - more easy than 11.2. But this is only my opinion.
So long, good luck with your system-buildinglol!.

thanks for the reply ojio …so open suse should detect the new hardware automatically and install new kernel modules automatically too …i just need to install video drivers for nvidia gpu and maybe network …and the system should be good to go …

my family have been using only linux for 4 years but apart from RAM memory and graphics card have not attempted to upgrade the main hardware your advice is most appreciated.

thanks again

Hello, Brunell,
do you already run openSUSE 11.1, or do you want to set it up on your computer? If not, so connect your printer and other external hardware during setup to your computer. This will install all of them automatically (HP Printers normally work like a charm with SUSE - never had problems with them so far). If you want to intall the drivers “by hand”, you can use hplip.
As I said, only the nvidia driver will have to be installed by hand (nvidia repository can be found under “community repositories” in YAST) and is normally no problem.
Greetings ojio