EPoX 4PDA5+ Review - Linux Compatibility
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Having the Soltek board run Gentoo Linux 1.4 and 2004.0 without problems for months, I was not terribly concerned with getting the 4PDA5+ running Linux. The two components I was worried about were the Silicon Image controller and the Marvell Gigabit ethernet card. The Soltek had a Realtek ALC850 sound processor, and everything else was run of the mill, although newbies to Linux will need to know that they need a Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) kernel in order to take advantage of the hyperthreading in a Pentium 4. That's not an EPoX specific thing; it applies to everybody. The problem with the Silicon Image SATA controller is that I don't have any SATA drives to try it out with, so I can only check to see if Linux can detect the controller. A bit of work in Google shows that support for both the SATA controller and the gigabit ethernet controller is available in the latest 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
I brought out my trusty Gentoo Linux 2004.0 CDs and attempted a stage 3 install. I used Gentoo because its recent and uses 2.4 kernels, although I did recompile a 2.4.26 and a 2.6.4 kernel instead of the Gentoo edition 2.4.22 kernel.
After some work with the kernels, it seems that Linux can detect the ethernet adapter and the SATA controller. Sound was not an issue, provided you are using the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). With newer sound cards you would be using ALSA anyway, and ALSA is built into the 2.6 kernel.
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