[plug] Changing hardware on desktop

[Cameron Patrick]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002 20:53:44 +0800, Jon Miller wrote:

| Like to know if Linux is like the other OS's in that there is a
| procedure when changing hardware.  Currently I have a Linux Red Hat
| 7.2 installed onaa desktop.  The hardware is a ASUS motherboard, AMD
| 750MHz, 512MB memory, DVD, CD-ROM, 3Ccom NIC, Soundblaster, WD30GB HDD
| and a nVidia 64MB Video Card.  I m planning to change the to a EPoX
| Motherboard (8K3A+) with DDR memory(currently DDR266), WD60 or 100GB
| HDD and the other device I'm changing is the video card to a GeForce4
| MX440.  In the matter of the motherboard in most OS changing this item
| usually involved either a complete install from scratch or hardware
| change program.  Is Linux the same when it comes to changing certain
| hardware.

It should Just Work without any fiddling. The NVIDIA drivers for both Linux and Windows don't care which particular NVIDIA-chipset card you have, unless you change from a PCI to an AGP card, in which case you /might/ have to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config.  So long as you either leave the machine with two hard discs, or copy everything over from one drive to the other, and the partitions have the same numbers, then the hard drive upgrade should be okay.  The Linux kernel should autodetect everything about the motherboard which it cares about.

You mentioned some OSes requiring a complete reinstall, so I'm assuming that you're referring to some of Microsoft's offerings here... Windows is sometimes really fiddly about motherboard changes - but then again, we have a Duron 900 running Win95 that has been running the same Windows installation since 1997. During that time, it has had a motherboard upgrade, two graphics card upgrades, two hard disc upgrades, a sound card upgrade and various different printers and network adapters installed.  Despite what some people say about reinstalling Windows annually, it's never really seemed necessary.

CP.