Journal: Ask Slashdot: New Chipsets and Linux?

My old desktop perished. a 10 year old Dell running a Coppermine 933. My wife bought me a new box, an AMD Athlon with all new shiny bells and whistles. I carefully made a backup disk of the copy of Windows XP that came on it, rubbing my hands together gleefully as I contemplated overwriting with my favorite Linux disty. (Gentoo, in case anyone's really interested.) After 4-5 days of DL'ing install CDs and LiveCDs for various disties, and trying each, I throw up my hands in frustration. None of them will boot past IDE discovery. A couple of more days research and it turns out the shiny new Intel chipset is not supported by anyone except MS. My question? How could I have found this out without days of sweating, and further, how can I find out when the chipset is going to be supported? (FYI, I DL'd VMWare Server, and am now running Gentoo as a guest OS under WINXP, but it's not a very satisfactory solution, from a 'getting-the-most-out-of-the-hardware' standpoint.)