Ubuntu 6.10 x86_64 saves the day too!

Another Ubuntu success story! We just bought a loaded $4,000 Dell Precision 690 to perform some digital imaging of moon and Mars image data and we were going to set it to dual boot to run Windows XP Pro 64 and a x86_64 version of Linux to run USGS ISIS 3.0. They recommended using OpenSUSE 10.1 so I downloaded a copy and tried it out. No luck, it didn't like our SAS RAID driver and wouldn't see our boot 80GB drive, and would not touch our dual 500GB RAID volume. I found some hints on trying to load an older MPT Fusion driver with the new 10.1 kernel, but thought I would first try a couple other distros lying around my office. The next attempt was CentOS 4.3 since the USGS site said RedHat EWS 4 was the "alternate" distro for them, and I knew CentOS 4 was pretty much RedHat EWS 4, just open and cheaper, so I gave it a shot. CentOS was able to deal with the SAS RAID controller just fine, but its NVIDIA driver was too old to recognize the spiffy Quadro FX3500 in our Precision. I downloaded the latest NVIDIA drivers and was told how to install them. It looked like a full recompile of the module and loading it in with the kernel and then reconfigure xorg. Okay, that sounded doable, but for grins, I thought I would try the hot new Ubuntu 6.10 and just see what happened. Lo and behold, Ubuntu 6.10 booted and recognized both the MPT Fusion SAS RAID controller with both volumes and the NVIDIA Quadro FX3500. It was able to create a VFAT (FAT32) file system on the RAID volume that both it and Windoze 64 could read (CentOS 4.3 had a "beta" FAT32 driver!) and I was able to set the FX3500 to run dual screen on the FX3500 in just a few minutes after adding some packages easily with Synaptic. I was able to get the ISIS software working fine on Ubuntu 6.10 as well with just a few more packages added.

On a whim I then tried the same Ubuntu 6.10 x86_64 CD on another AMD64 based system in the department, but this one with an NVIDIA FX5500 running dual monitors. Running under Windoze the user had to re-install the NVIDIA video driver after every reboot to run his two monitors in dual display mode. After reboots, Windows just would not remember the configuration for some reason. And since Windows reboots itself practically every Wednesday morning after the latest severe XP security flaw patch, we thought we would give Ubuntu a try. Ubuntu 6.10's updated NVIDIA driver recognized his FX5500 fine, and after installing the nvidia-glx and one unrestricted kernel module package, the system rebooted with the new NVIDIA driver and with a simple "nvidia-xconfig --twinview" his system can now boot into a dual display mode and actually remember the settings! Another amazing Ubuntu success story!

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