Trying to install 2.1 today.

Hardware: MB: Asus P5Q Pro Chipset: Intel P45, ICH10R

This is a tri-boot new system with Ubuntu 8.04 (64 bit) as the primary day to day system, Windows XP as a "just in case" OS and 64Studio strictly for media creation and editing.

Windows had to go on first but was having problems BSOD on install. After reading around I found that the BIOS needed to be in AHCI for Ubuntu so I set it and worked with it. Needed a driver disk for the ICH10R to install Windows XP and that came right on the Asus supplied CD if you just boot it you can make a floppy. As a note, I had to disable the onboard IDE controller and remove my old IDE drives to get it to work. I've heard this MB uses a cheap IDE controller and many new boards aren't supporting IDE very well. They go in another box to be mounted by NFS now.

The Asus P5Q Pro PCI-E Gigabit ethernet driver was reported not to work in Linux (Atheros/Attansic L1 I believe). Fortunately all you need is a driver disk to get it to work, but I found out there is no hardware support in Windows. Solution: disable it and install a card.

With the above BIOS corrections Ubuntu and Windows installed.

But I ran into the infamous Debian installer issue with 64Studio. With SATA set to AHCI in the BIOS the installer boots the CD, reads the installation program, but then fails to recognize the drive any further and displays the "No common CD-ROM drive was detected."

The solution: change the BIOS setting to RAID and try again. This time the installer picks it up. After installation, remove the CD/DVD, reboot into the BIOS and change SATA back to AHCI to work with previous installed OS's and reboot for success. The installed kernel has no prob with AHCI, only the installer does.

Watch if you have XFS paritions setup already because the Debian installer doesn't have the XFS option available. You'll have to do some work and add it to the mounts later.

More issues to resolve before setup but I'm hoping I could help others with these.

Two points to consider:

1. Asus P5Q Pro board not the best option, does not have high quality chips, but does have the Intel P45 if you only need to work with SATA, etc.

2. "No common CD-ROM drive was detected" installer error can be rectified by choosing a different BIOS option for install, then changing back after install.