A friend of mine just bought a new motherboard (ASUS) with a Triton II
chipset. He wants to use this machine for DOS/W95. He was experiencing
serious data corruption on his EIDE drives, thus I decided to test if
this is a problem with his RAM chips or with the EIDE interfaces. I
plugged in my ethernet card and remote booted Linux. There were no
apparent problems with compiling the kernel multiple times; even
parallel compiles did not exhibit any unusual problems (other than
virtual memory exceeded :-)). Thus we deducted, that the motherboard
and the RAM are probably fine, but that the EIDE interfaces are very
susceptible to HF noise. After shortening the flat ribbon cables to
less than 10in and removing all but one of his harddrives, things seem
to have stabilized.
Although this is just a very superficial test, it suggests, that the
Triton II chipset seems to work fine with Linux. Nonetheless it is
advisable to install SCSI rather than EIDE equipment. BTW, I noted
similar problems with my brother's computer who has a Triton I based
motherboard.
Markus
-- Markus Gutschke Internet: gutschk@math.uni-muenster.de Schlage 5a D-48268 Greven-Gimbte Germany