Step 2: Install linux

This has by far, been the most frustrating step so far, and I will probably make more than one post about it cause it's not done yet. Many issues have cropped up because of my hardware choices.

Here's what I've done so far:

1. Downloaded Fedora Core 3 x86_64 cd iso's.
2. The installer couldn't see my SATA drive. I tried loading different drivers. I started with the Silicon Image driver because I knew that's what the motherboard used from various sources online and the driver disk included with the mobo.
3. None of the drivers worked, so I tried changing the setting in BIOS to use the SATA RAID feature instead of IDE emulation. That didn't work either.
4. Punt: installed an old IDE disk from my old machine that was dead figuring I could install a newer kernel version (FC3 ships with 2.6.9)
5. Installed on the old IDE drive. This was a major PITA too. The install was taking forever. It seemed like it was having trouble reading the cd's. I switched into the other virtual terminals on the installer with ctrl-alt-f2, f3, etc. to read the logs. There were errors there about timeouts while reading from hda (the dvd/cd drive).
6. Since the DVD player was brand new and a cheapo OEM version, I thought maybe it was bad or the cable was bad. I tried replacing each with known working cables/players from other machines. Still no luck.
7. So I downloaded and burned the dvd iso instead of the cd iso's and just let the install run until it completed. This took half a dozen hours.
8. Finally, the machine is running linux. But it's really really slow, just like the install was, and my SATA drive is still not visible. So I searched and found that the SATA driver was updated by someone from ATI in kernel 2.6.11. So I installed the 2.6.11 rpm from Fedora rawhide.
9. Upon reboot, the SATA drive was visible, and the machine ran much much faster. In fact, the clock ran at 3x the normal speed. Like it gained 1 minute every 20 seconds. Even NTP wouldn't be able to correct for that amount of drift. This 3x clock problem deserves it's own post.
10. I wanted to try installing only on the SATA drive cause the goal is to not have the old drives in this machine (they're noisy, and I don't want a noisy machine in my living room). So I rsynced all the Fedora FC4 rawhide rpms and built an iso dvd.
11. Installed on the SATA drive from the FC4 iso. However it couldn't boot from the SATA drive. So I have to use the boot partition on the old IDE drive.

Linux is installed and running, but the 3x problem has to be fixed. MythTV's recording schedule will be way out of whack if I can't fix it. And I still have a noisy old disk in there.