From: Alexander V. Karelin (karelin_at_nonexisting.hamakor.org.il)
Date: Sat 13 Mar 2004 - 12:02:38 IST
Dear All!
The mother-board mentioned in the subject is rather popular in Israel
nowadays and seems to be linux-usable, however I've encountered some
serious problems (some of them not yet resolved) trying to make RedHat
9.0 work with it. (Pray do not begin another distro-war;))
The purpose of this message is to first of all warn everybody about the
issues I've encountered and than, perhaps, to may be find some advice
that goes beyond the info found with google, RedHat and other popular
resources.
First of all - here's my full configuration:
P4 2.8Ghz/800
P4R800-VM Asus motherboard with ATI Radeon IGP (9200/9100/9000 - the
model is unclear as even ASUS's documentation fails to define the exact
model of the graphical chipset), on-board 3Com 5900-comatible NIC, USB2,
SoundMax (ADI 1888) AC sound card.
2x256Mb DDR PC400
IDE Maxtor HDD 80GB
IDE Quantom HDD 20GB (will go away once I get all the useful data from
there)
CD + Floppy (both work suprisingly!)
Now - the horror stories (and some solutions I found):
1) The network card is still a standing issue. I could make it work with
the vortex driver (scyld.com is the vortex driver's home, if You're
wondering). It showed everything well via ip -o l, but did not work. I
had to find a workaround and so I did: I've installed another network
card (A Myson 8xx compatible) and it works. However, thanks to a rather
strange bug (the driver's author has posted several fixes so far) the
card doesn't function quite well. Once in a while it's driver issues a
strange error: "etho0 transmission timeout bla-bla-bla". This state
sometimes may hang the computer completely, so that the only way out is
a reset. Another thing I noticed is that this scenario happens quite
often if recent (1.6) mozilla is used, instead of RedHat 9.0 shipped
1.2. The latter simply drops out dead.
2) Disk access... Despite the IDE chipset being supported by Linux
kernel, despite RedHat's installation working seemlessly, both the
shipped 2.4.20-8 kernel (and the custom 2.6.3) fail to get the disks
working in DMA mode. This makes the kernel go bananas during
compilations and other operations that use the disk a lot. Under kernel
2.6.3 I'm getting an error about TSC being unreliable quite often.
During my research for a solution I've encountered a beautiful and
magical solution - "enable via support" - but I'm still wondering what
the might have meant... I'm sure it's not the via82 sound card.
3) ATI Radeon - the only problem I solved so far to my full
satisfaction. Here's what I had to do:
Firstly, I made X11 run with the generic VESA driver. Than I've
downloaded the XFree86 upgrades via up2date (RedHat's on-line system
update). There's a trick though - You first have to update the up2date
itself, and than all the rest of the packages. After that I've altered
my /etc/X11XF86Config manualy so that it looks like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "ATI Radeon 9100"
ChipId 0x5834
EndSection
This way it started working quite well. Now here's a strange thing.
Firstly, this setup would not work before the X11 update. Secondly, the
ChipId may vary from one MB to another as I've found several different
versions of the ChipId that, according to what the posters have claimed,
worked fancily with their P4R800-VM ATI Radeon chip. My guess here is
that ASUS itself makes minor changes in its boards from time to time,
without updating the model number or documents.
4) Sound card. I'm stuck here. Theoretically (according to what some
people claim) this board's built-in sound card (ADI 1888, AD 1888,
es1888, Sound Max, intel8x0 - that's the list of different nicknames
I've gathered around the net for what must be living there on my mb)
should work with ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). However the
latter remains so far unusable with the 2.4.20-8 kernel. Why? Because
despite all the tricks I've used (after finding a handful on the net) I
couldn't make its modules work. They all fail, having trouble with
__write_lock_failure, __read_lock_failure and some other symbols. Now -
the newer kernels (2.6 series) have ALSA incorporated. But I couldn't
make the soundcard work there either, despite loading the correct module
(according to documentation).
5) The CD that comes with the board has, oh holy billy, some Linux
drivers. Don't even bother looking at them. Some of them do compile
(occasionally), but none of them work. Well - at least there's a folder
"Linux" on the CD. BTW: the same thing can be told about 49NIS worth
Asound Network Card (the one that is currently tossing the packets on
the machine) - it had some Linux drivers on its diskette. Alas. They
wouldn't even compile. Just in case - the card works with fealnx module
under 2.4.20-8.
6) There's also a weird GCC freak-out on RedHat 9 that seems to have
been reported by other people to RedHat itself. Sometimes gcc simply
stops and says (and I'm quoting here): internal error: segmentation
fault. I think it has more to do with the absence of DMA disk access,
which makes multitasking faulty and GCC sick. Or perhaps I'm wrong and
it's a known issue. Anyhow, I found that doing "make clean; make"
usually lets GCC snap out of it. Workaround, eh?!
7) SMP... I found that SMP kernel, that RedHat decides to make default
on this machine because of it's HyperThreading capabilities, is half as
fast and not nearly as stable as the normal kernel. I suppose it has
more to do with the fact that HyperThreading is not yet a
fully-supported kick on neither Linux or motherboards. However, if any
of You happens to have more readable (and comprehensible) information on
this - I'd be glad to take a look (a read) at it.
Well - that sums it all up, I guess. I'm sorry about bugging You all
with such a long post, I hope to have been at least entertaining and I
hope to have at least warned some of You. I will be glad to hear some
ideas on how this MB can be put into work (such a waste, I have to say -
when it works it really flies!). Thank You!
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