iMica

[Harrison]

Thanks for the link.

Near the bottom of the page did you notice the entry for iMica? It seems that currently AROS isn't fully compatible! It is showing the the chipset and IDE work, but SATA is running in legacy mode, there are no graphics drivers so it runs in vesa mode, there is no audio support (hence the addition of an extra PCI soundblaster live sound card), USB doesn't work, and Ethernet works slowly. So maybe iMica isn't the ideal AROS solution?

Looking through the page, I have to say it is quite hard to navigate and find information. They have tried to create useful information groupsed into device type, but most of it is untested, and you have to then sift through the remaining information below these tables to actually discover what is compatible. Hopefully with more time this will improve. It does seem a shame that with the length of time in development they don't seem to have been able to test the OS on a very large variety of hardware.

The good news is that I have a spare PCI Soundblaster Live Gold! So hopefully that will work perfectly. Not usre on the chipset but I think it matches the Live 5.1 so fingers crossed it is the one they have listed as working, but if not I will see if it does work and add that information to their site.

I also have a spare Audigy 1 sound card, but it is showing currently as no driver support.

And graphics card wise I have a few spare AGP cards including a Radeon 9600, 9800 Pro and older nVIdia TNT and Matrox G400 Max, and the site says it supports up to Radeon 9800 so that is good.

Ethernet I'm not sure. I have the option of built in ethernet ports, plus I have some spare Linksys PCI NICs that might contain 3com chips so could work.

I noticed nForce 2 is mentioned as working and I do have 3 spare Athlon XP boards with nForce 2 chips, but none are currently in a built system so would require a case, ram etc...

Realtek seems to work and as most older boards I have use that for onboard audio that could be something.

USB support seems quite hit and miss, and this is something I think they really need to make work for all hardware port types as USB is now the standard, with most external devices using it to connect. So it might be interesting trying to get this working. I do have a spare USB2 PCI card though so if I find the motherboard USB ports won't work I can at least try that.

This is quite exciting. I will have to give this a try later in the week.

[Harrison]

Just thought. If only certain hardware does prove to work, then anyone who can build a fully functioning system could have a system on their hands that suddenly increases in value on ebay!