Hardware experiences? [FOLLOW-UP]

[Peter King]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 02:25:07PM -0400, Peter King wrote:

> I'm thinking of getting a new machine -- so I'm interested in any
> Linux war stories, good or bad, with the following hardware:
> 
>   AMD Athlon 64 X2 (dual core)
>   Asus M2V Socket AM2 (Via K8T890) motherboard
>   Asus EN7300GS GeForce 7300GS video card
> 
> I expect to run Gentoo, to get the full 64-bit environment for the
> Athlon, and because I have to do something with the spare processor
> cycles ;-)

A few weeks ago I posted the above message, and got many helpful
replies. I thought I'd follow up with a brief report on the hardware.

The motherboard has been a real struggle, so far. It uses two rather new
and unusual components: a Via 8237A SouthBridge (note the "A"), which
includes the SATA controller, and an Attasic gigabit ethernet chipset.
There seems to be a patch in the very latest kernels for the SouthBridge
(2.6.17.11+) but I could only find one distro that had a bleeding-edge
installation disk that worked: the Knot 2 release of Edgy Eft, for
(K)Ubuntu. So that's what I installed, despite the fact that I'm a
command-line addict. This machine is so fast even KDE runs at a
reasonable speed! ;-)

Incidentally, if anyone knows how I could (or could have) installed
gentoo on this thing, given that the 2006.1 release does not support
the SATA controller, I'd be interested to know. The only things I could
think of were to install a straight IDE disk, install to that, and then
upgrade to a kernel that could see the SATA disks -- or, if I had but
world enough and time, to roll my own "LiveCD". Neither option was very
appealing, so I took the third way out: Wait, and it'll be supported by
2007.1.

The onboard ethernet is doing me no good. I dropped in an old PCI
ethernet card I had, to get connectivity while I find out whether there
is anything to do about it. I read in a post somewhere how to recompile
the source code provided by ASUS, but, of course, I've lost the link. Oh
well.

I'm surprised by the problems with the motherboard: I thought ASUS was
well-supported, and, after all, nobody mentioned the off-brand chipset.
That's what I get for not buying new computers more regularly!

The video card works well. I can't figure out how to get the framebuffer
working properly to get a decent console resolution, but that's likely
just my unfamiliarity with (K)Ubuntu. It's close enough to Debian so it
isn't so hard to pick up. I would like to get all the eye-candy out of
the way, though.

(K)Ubuntu automagically sets up a separate group of 32-bit libraries for
folks to run OpenOffice (installed by default) or Firefox (available if
you want it). The integration is seamless.

Thanks to one and all who offered advice and suggestions!

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Department of Philosophy
215 Huron Street
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-4951 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5S 1A2
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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