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