It is good to read that you had a positive experience with one of the latest Icaros Desktop Live! AROS discs.

I've not tried AROS since the Icaros pre-configured desktop setups have been available and I'm very eager to try it. I downloaded the latest 1.1.4 Live DVD and have burnt it to disc ready. And I was just checking through the hardware compatibility in the included PDF manual and it looks like I have spare hardware that is fully compatible.

The system I am going to try it on is one of my old PCs I currently don't use. It is a smaller form factor Biostar system that was originally purchased as a barebones system for downloading and emulation. Its specs seem to fit nicely with the AROS requirements.

  • Athlon XP 3000+
  • 1GB DDR3200 Ram
  • 60GB IDE HDD
  • nForce 2 chipset - The PDF mentioned nVidia nForce compatibility for networking so fingers crossed.
  • nForce 2 AC97 audio - It also mentions that many AC97 integrated codecs work, so again fingers crossed. However if that doesn't work I have a couple of spare sound cards that are supported (Soundblaster Live! 5.1 and an Audigy 1 soundcard), so can use one of those instead if needed.
  • Graphics card - The SFF motherboard has integrated GeForce graphics, but that might not work. In which case I have both an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, and a Radeon 9600 spare so hopefully one of those two AGP cards will work.

The only point I might get stuck is if the integrated networking and audio don't work. I have spare compatible sound cards as already mentioned, and also spare network cards. However this SFF system only has 1 AGP and 1 PCI slot so it would be impossible to add both PCI cards at once. Lets hope that isn't needed, or I will have to dig out one of my other unused PCs and build an AROS PC from that with the compatible hardware I have.

Looking forward to trying this out now. Has anyone else recently tried the Icaros Desktop distros of AROS?