Recently, I decided to turn my HP m7557c computer (motherboard: A8M2N-LA / NodusM-GL8E) to an Unix server. The nightmare began. After trying nearly 10 different operating systems and distributions, I found that only very few of them worked with A8M2N-LA / NodusM-GL8E. I think it is worth to share my experience with this beast – an experiment result that took more than 100 hours.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
-- Thomas A. Edison

Fedora 13
Status: No
Comment: Installation went well, but the system was very unstable due to kernel panic. This mother board may not compatible with the newer Linux kernel.

FreeBSD 7.3
Status: No
Comment: Does not support USB keyword, i.e., can’t start the installation.

FreeBSD 8.1
Status: Yes
Comment: Stable, however the harddrives are very unstable. Sometimes the system complains about the harddrive. See the full story here.

FreeBSD 8.2
Status: Yes
Comment: Very stable. No problem found so far.

OS X 10.4
Status: No
Comment: Installation failed.

OS X 10.5.8
Status: No
Comment: Installation completed, but very unstable. The system reboots itself.

OS X 10.6
Status: No
Comment: Installation failed

Ubuntu 9.10
Status: Yes, stable.

Ubuntu 10.04
Status: No
Comment: If install directly from the disk, the system will not boot. The only possible way is to upgrade from an earlier version. See Ubuntu 10.04 – Can’t boot / Can’t install for details.

Ubuntu 10.10
Status: No
Comment: Cannot even load the installation disk.

Hope my experience is helpful to you.

–Derrick