openSUSE

I bought the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and ECS C51GM-M combo deal from Fry's about a month ago. Past experiences had told me that motherboard that comes with a combo deal won't last more than a year, however, the price of the combo is the same as the CPU alone... so I brought them home expecting to upgrade the motherboard later.

But first, I needed memory. I looked at the Qualified Vendor List and did research on the internet to find out which vendors and models will work with the motherboard. I went to the store and got the Corsair VS2GBKIT667D2. After I got a case and a DVD drive, I started assembling everything together. They worked ^_^

For a change, I decided to install Linux on it. I downloaded the iso image from the openSUSE site and created a installation DVD from it.

Installation worked smoothly, so smooth that I didn't test the display settings (because Linux had detected the right video card and monitor). When the machine reboot, the screen went blank. I did the "sax2 trick", it still didn't work, so I reinstalled openSUSE again (it was actually faster and much easier). AND MAKE SURE to set the display setting into lower setting.

It worked! ^_^

After I installed the driver downloaded from nVidia, I changed to higher display setting.

Everything is working now ^_^