Best distro for dual core pen. D

**LinuxUser254** · 06-25-2006

i have a pentium d 930 computer with a nvidia 7300le graphics card, and a wireless card. i was wondering if i would need a special version of linux designed to take advantage of the dual core, and i would probably need one with very good hardware recgnition because this thing has two tv inputs, media card reader, and a wireless card, which might make it hard to fiind a distro that would recognize all of them. i would like to dual boot linux and media center, so should i use lilo or grub? is there anything else i need to be aware of before i just go install? i am new to linux, i have onl run a live cd before and that is it. Please give any advice you have on the above topics.

**bigtomrodney** · 06-25-2006

Most if not all distros support symmetric multicore processing, you may just have to install the SMP kernel rather than the default one. The latest kernel release last week (2.6.17) by default has SMP which is detected at boot. The two favourites for hardware detection are generally considered to be SUSE and Ubuntu. I personally prefer SUSE, which I think has a great config tool - YaST. Your big trouble will be getting the wireless card working, though it's not so much hard as unfamiliar to those who haven't done it before.

SUSE 10.1 is the latest release and I'm posting from it now. I can recommend it but be aware it has a bug in the package manager which is due to be patched quite soon.

Lilo and Grub are both capable of what you need but SUSE installs Grub by default so for the sake of simplicity you can leave it as is. Best bet is to go ahead and install windows first leaving free space for your linux install and then your distro will more than likely be able to handle the rest itself. Let us know how you get on.

**techieMoe** · 06-25-2006

As bigtomrodney mentioned, you don't need a special distro to use symmentric multiprocessing (SMP) on a dual-core or multi-CPU system. All major distributions either install these by default when they detect multiple cores/CPUs or allow you the option to install the SMP kernel yourself.

**LinuxUser254** · 06-26-2006

thanks for the help, i am going to go burn the ubuntu live cd right now.

-live cd boots up but it does not recognize my wireless card, but i will probably just install it, and then use one of the multiple ways to get it to work. Also i am a bit concerned on partitioning the disk, it has plenty of room on it, but i dont want to corrupt windows. what is the best alternative to partion magic
for partioning disks without deleting what is already on it?

**LinuxUser254** · 07-05-2006

I finished intalling Ubuntu, and now i dual boot Media Center and Ubuntu. I was just wondering how i could tell if I was using the dual-core kernel. I don't know how to check, but I am sure it is probably easy, but i am just a noob.

**antidrugue** · 07-05-2006

Originally Posted by LinuxUser254

I was just wondering how i could tell if I was using the dual-core kernel.

Check out the output of

Code:

uname -a

It should mention "SMP".

If not, you can install a SMP kernel for Pentium with the restricted modules like that (or something similar) :

Code:

sudo apt-get install linux-686-smp

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