Matthew Allen wrote: Good luck. If your experience is like mine you'll get a lot of people looking over your shoulder to find out about Linux. I ended up with Compaq R3070 at a good price. In my case pretty much everything worked well in the store except hdparm -tT speeds. I could see that in my case the Compaq was using a new ATI chipset so I came home, did some snooping and found that DMA support was added somewhere around 2.6.5, so installing that level of kernel when I built the machine solved that problem. However, then under 2.6.6 I had some Alsa problems (<hehe> so what's new about that?!?) which Takashi has recently solved. The machine now works quite nicely in both Gentoo and Win XP Pro running Pro Tools on the road. - Mark