Hi guys!
Just finished my installation. The machine: Opteron 144, 2G of DDRAM Dual Channel, MSI MS7093 ATI based motherboard, 250 GB SATA drive. I've installed on the machine CentOS 3.6 (which basically is RHEL 3.6). Even if it's kernel 2.4 (which is good for EDA), this linux distribution was able to recognize the SATA controller and it installed it smoothly. There were only 2 problems:
1. video driver - I've just downloaded it from ATI....it worked ok 24 bit 1280x1024...could do higher but don't have a monitor...
2. system clock was running twice as fast as normal......a bug related to ATI RS480 chipset. Kernels higher than 2.6.12 have this fixed, however I wanted to stick to 2.4 so adding some parameters to the kernel to avoid using APIC fixed it.
Probably the IC5033 hack described in this forum would have worked, but being lazy I just installed IC5033 on a RH 7.3 machine that I had on the network and copied it to the new machine.....so far it seems to work altough it complains about errno.h ... will let you guys know these days if problems appear.
By the way, Opteron is 64 bit, installed 64 bit CentOS...everything seems fine....