advise please on hardware: optical mouse and HD adapter

[Anton Markov]

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Hi Zbigniew,

Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> We are doing ordering of the system through the Dell's web site.
Make sure you know the exact model of the motherboard and other
components (video, sound, LAN). While most new systems should work,
certain boards (especially all-in-ones) such as ATI motherboards are
problematic under Linux.

> The first problem: can I use "USB 2-Button Optical Mouse with Scroll" to
> work with Linux?
USB mice work fine with the default USB mouse driver in all recent
kernels. Under 2.6 the model is "usbmouse". As long as the USB chip on
the motherboard is supported, the mouse will work. Most USB chips use
either the UHCI (USB 1.1) or EHCI (USB 2.0) drivers (under 2.6 they are
uhci-hcd and ehci-hcd). I am not sure of any problems with specific
motherboards, but perhaps other people have suggestions in this area.

> Second: Do I need "SATA Integrated PCI Non-RAID adapter for 1 SATA HDD"?
> I do not know what for it is. My guess is that it is used with SATA HD,
> which we are going to order.
If you are getting a SATA harddrive, then you need a SATA
controller/adapter to use it. "Non-RAID" means it won't allow you to
turn two drives into a RAID array, but that doesn't matter with just one
drive (and is best done with the software driver anyway). As far as
Linux compatibility goes, I believe the SATA drivers are still in beta,
though I could be mistaken. However, I hear they work well.

I don't know which SATA controllers are supported under Linux, so I
would find out the _exact_ model of the SATA controller on this
"adapter" and then do a search on <http://google.com/linux>  for it.
Just make sure you are reading up-to-date information; this is a new
technology, and support is quickly improving.

I hope this helped.


- --
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

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