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Hello, I am kind of new to Linux OSs but have have seen enough to know I want to run linux. Now the problem. I built a computer. Asus M3N78-EM AMD Athalon 64 x2 Kuna 3.7Ghz processor WD 250GB HD WD 200GB HD 2GB Kingston DDR2 1066 dual channel ram wireless Mi keyboard and mouse This MB is fairly new to the market. Has HDMI, DVI. Nvidia 8300, 7.1 realtek audio and optical. It is a pretty nice board. I am using it for an Home entertainment computer and hooking it up to my surround sound and LCD toshiba tv with the HDMI. The drives were empty. I put in Freespire and tried the live cd but it said I/O errors. So I went and tried Ubuntu 8.10 and it just freezes trying to load. So I thought maybe a different distro being those are debian based and when with Sabuyon and this worked great in the live run. It is very similar (looks) to Freespire and I installed. Install went fine. then I did the restart and pulled the disk and it started to load. Went to enter user name and password and it started but then said something like error check you installation. restart with the disk and it works fine on live cd. I dont know what the problem was. I tried to reinstall but no good then tried the install that fixes errors and stuff, it took 3 hours and still didnt work. So I dowloaded Poseiden, ubuntu based. It worked with the live and installed but also didnt work right. Tried many distros, cant remeber them all, Slackware, Fedora, etc... I really want Freespire or Sabayon to work but lost with what to do to make them work. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix the issues or am I just stuck with using Windows? I am just sick of them. thanks, joel

Linux isn't too good yet with HDMI (due, I understand, to the DRM features it "supports"). If you can plug your display into the DVI port (I assume the MB has one) you might get better results, and you might have to go into the BIOS to make some configuration changes to run on Linux better. I assume you are using SATA drives?

Sometimes real fast is almost as good as real time. Remember, Google is your friend!

My HD are IDE and I have a DVD burner that is SATA. I have been in the bios changing things and mesing around in there to make it work. It did do some stuff because Feespire would have a different error or load differently, never all of the way. My brother was messing with it and loaded windows quick and went and got the downloads for the MB from Asus but it did not help. Hey Winston I will download Debian and see if that works better. I have been messing with it a little more and now Poseiden works great, installs and runs. I still can not get my rear 7.1 sound or the HDMI to work. I have no clue how to get the HDMI an 7.1 to work with Linux. I also tried Ubuntu and it works also. You would think since these work than Freespire would too. I would rather run KDE than Gnome though.

Yes this MB has Nvidia 8300. I will try to find the bios setting for that. thanks

Also, you can get kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the KDE desktop if you prefer. In any case, you should be able to get and install KDE on a normal Ubuntu distribution with the package manager.

Sometimes real fast is almost as good as real time. Remember, Google is your friend!