Larry J. Linder wrote:
> After reading a lot of the failure reports and noise.
> 

We had some problems with one of the download servers.  This has been fixed.
Where people were able to get a good download and DVD burn, there 
haven't been install problems.

> Are the available distributions what we are going to live with for the 
> immediate future?
> 

It's released, yes.  Until SL 5.5.

> When I read the release notes for SL 5.4  there is no mention of the S ATA 
> problem or it being fixed.
> 

SATA bug fixes are really a driver and upstream vendor issue.
They have changed the way they do their release notes, so those issues 
are not pulled out and are in more detail.  You can find it here.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.4/html-single/Technical_Notes/

And there are a few things that might have fixed your SATA problem.
*Bug fixes:
- when using the aic94xx driver, a system with SATA drives may not boot 
due to a bug in libsas.
- a bug in aic94xx may have caused kernel panics during boot on some 
systems with certain SATA disks.
- fixed an issue in which sata_nv was not included in the initramfs.

That last issue might have fixed the problem that you were seeing since 
you were using a motherboard with an nvidia chipset

> NVidea problems I had with SL 5.3 can be taken care of by disabling the video 
> module at install and boot up and just set the desired display resolution.  
> Thank for tip from a SL user.
> 
> When I tried to install SL 5.3 on 64 bit system with  Serial ATA disks.   The 
> installation just hangs.    I have  Suse 11. on this system but really would 
> like to use SL.  Suse 11.1 - 11.3  has the same NVidea problem.
> 
> The ISO images for SL 5.4 were down loaded a few weeks ago and I wonder if 
> its worth the effort to make the disks and install SL 5.4. since the release 
> notes never said any thing about the SATA interface or at least I didn't find 
> it.
> 

A few weeks ago SL 5.4 was *not* released.  If you are worried about all 
of the above things, and then are willing to install a beta instead of 
the final release, I'm a bit surprised.
Download the final release.  Do an md5sum and/or sha1sum on the image, 
and use that image.

Troy
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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/LSCS/CSI/USS Group
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