Hardware experiences? [FOLLOW-UP]

[Jamon Camisso]

Peter King wrote:
> 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! ;-)

That's frustrating. Did you use the alternate cd or gui to install then ;)

> 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.

I'd have used that Edgy livecd (I assume that's what you used) to 
install gentoo through the normal chroot process, downloading and 
compiling the necessary patches to the 2.6.17 kernel into your chroot.

> 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.

Cool that they're doing drivers for their stuff now. Too bad you can't 
get it to work though. The readme has this bit, you made it this far I 
assume?

 >4. Compile the driver module:
 >
 > make install
 >
 > The binary will be installed as:
 >
 > /lib/modules/<KERNEL VERSION>/kernel/drivers/net/atl1.[k]o

http://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socketAM2/M2V/Linux_LAN.zip

> 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!

Apart from the SATA issue, it seems like they are really trying, what 
with the LAN driver that supposedly works. Perhaps a few more weeks?

> 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.

Openoffice in Edgy is now a full 64bit package if I am not mistaken. 
They claim that edgy+1 should have full multiarch support once debian 
Etch goes stable.

There is a beta tool called nspluginwrapper that allows 32bit extensions 
to 64 bit firefox: http://www.gibix.net/dokuwiki/en:projects:nspluginwrapper

They claim ("reasonable") support for the following:
Acrobat Reader (5.0.9 and 7.0.1)
DejaVu Libre (3.5.14)
Flash Player (7.0)
Linux JPEG 2000 (0.0.2)
Mplayerplug-in (2.80)
Real Player (10.0.5)

Jamon
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