SL 5.4 now works with SATA drives.
NVida chip set now works.
The first time to set up video was strange,  a clean reload did not exhibit 
the same problem, we assume it had to do with something left in NVida chip 
set.

Adding disks to a working system manually is not as easy as it used to be on 
SL 5.4.  

Opensuse 11 and Yest has a pretty good disk management scheme.

However Opensuse 11.3 has two issues that caused us to abandon it.   The 
video system quit working during installation and the LVM was always getting 
in the way of setting up a system to be used for Engineering work.
Nice if you are running a DB.  but not cool when you are supporting a bunch 
of maverick Engineers who want it done their way.  In Opensuse 11 you could 
at least not select LVM.

First application for  SL 5.4 for doing some high speed atmospheric data 
analysis.  The sample rates are 10 uSec. for 4 channels of 14 bit, broad band 
data that sometimes last for a 1/2 hr or more.   Once this is running we will 
add a few terabytes of disk space and let it run for a few weeks and see how 
it progresses.   This is written in "C" but with a "C++" flavor.

A second application is to analyze wind date taken from an array of 4 remote 
anemometer placed in a 200 ft grid.  The data system we built wakes up every 
5 minutes and reads the data, goes back to sleep.   We service it every 30 
days to swap out (camera chip) and the re-chargeable battery pack.  

To visualize the data we need is to be able to run is "silab" to plot the 
data in at least 3 d and maybe 4 d if we can add time as the 4 dimension.

We plan to eventually put a number of boxes into a cluster to get analysis 
done quicker.

Thank You - for fixing the basic problems so we can use existing hardware.

Regards
Larry Linder