Q I recently bought an Intel 865 desktop board. I have a Seagate 120GB SATA hard drive. I tried installing Red Hat on it, but with no success. Can you tell me which Linux flavour I should use? Will Mandrake 10.1 detect my Seagate SATA hard disk?
A Any recent distribution of Linux will have a kernel capable of supporting SATA controllers, including Mandrake 10.1. If you want a distribution comparable to Red Hat, you could install Fedora, which is the free brand of Red Hat's popular Linux distro. Anything older than a year or two isn't going to have a kernel that supports the use of SATA devices, simply because they didn't exist, and unfortunately there's no compatibility mode with a generic IDE controller to use SATA devices.