Hardware experiences? [FOLLOW-UP]

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Sep 17, 2006 at 09:52:04PM -0400, Peter King wrote:
> 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!

I did mention nvidia chipsets were much more likely to work.  Via often
works, but not always.  I am sure it will be supported eventually (as in
within a few months at the longest) by a new kernel.  In fact it appears
it is in 2.6.18-rc4 and newer, so it will be included in 2.6.18 by the
looks of it.  As soon as that is released, and your distribution updates
their installer to use it, you will be all set.

Nvidia boards have at least the nvidia ethernet port, which in my
experience just works (although it used to be only 100mbit, I think it
now has gigabit too).  Most asus boards I have used lately have a
marvell yukon chip for gigabit, which should work with skge/sk98lin
driver.  The attastic they seem to be using on cheaper boards on the
other hand, required patching the kernel source last I checked (I don't
own any boards with that chip, so I haven't followed it very much).

> 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!

--
Len Sorensen
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