[GRLUG] Choice of MB - Trouble Installing

[Greg Folkert]

On Sat, 2008-06-07 at 04:05 +0000, rh90p at comcast.net wrote:
> Video is an 8X card in an 8X slot.  I'm not a complete idiot.
> 
> ASUS says the drivers needed for the VIA and Promise are ONLY
> available for Windows.  My experience was leading me in that
> direction.  SuSE 9.3 seems to work except that it can't seem to deal
> with some state the VIA and Promise controllers seem to be in.  I'm
> not sure what is causing the kernel panic but its occuring at about
> the point where it might be attempting to access disks.  
> 
> I was getting the impression that VIA might no be well supported
> lately and someone else just said the same thing.  VIA used to be
> supported back when my P3V4X was new but I had the trouble with the
> Tyan Tiger 133 which was VIA and these are VIA.  Maybe its still in
> the kernel but no longer included by default.  If I could get
> something to work that I could build a kernel on I could find that
> out.

Just as a note, I've only seen two machines ever not load a modern
Linux. Those machines being older machines that meet today's nominal
minimum base requirements, that being 32MB of RAM and Being a Pentium
Processor (Pentium-1) with at least a 2MB PCI video card and a 300MB
disk (SCSI, IDE, RLL or Winchester)

And both of them thar machines had some kind of funky hardware damage,
that also prevented Windows from being loaded, but could partially
function with 80x25 display without any video mode changing. One was
provided to me by John-Thomas, just recently.

As far as you current problems, disable the raid function. Usually ASUS
has "RAID or ATA" as modes for the "Raid-Lite" controllers built in. You
may also want to blank the first 1024 bytes of the disk(s) to be used.
>From a "LiveCD" on a console window:

	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=2 bs=512

With hda being replaced with the proper device (hda,hdb,hdX or
sda,sdb,sdX... etc)

FYI:
I have a Tyan Tiger with Dual Pentium 133 Processors and a whopping 48MB
of memory on the board. It was running a 2.4.18 kernel for years,
upgraded it to a 2.6.8 kernel without any problem. I used it as my
Firewall for a LONG TIME. Only reason I changed it, it generated to much
heat and I wanted a smaller form factor for my firewall.

I could take an inventory of all the motherboards I have here right now,
that have all seen Linux on them running smoothly without problems.

It you want I could even yank out my 24MB, 486-DX/2 66MHz and crank it
up and install Linux on it, including my #Nine VESA Localbus Video card,
with the ISA Slot Adaptec 1542A SCSI card and 210MB Micropolis SCSI hard
disk and 1X SCSI CDROM Reader and the 3C509 ISA 10MB NIC. The PC-Power
and Cooling 410W Slim Power supply is still good.

<sarcasm>
Nah. I doubt I know and I'm not sure who made the motherboard... I am
sure though, the manufacturer will say it won't support Linux ever. I
guess I shouldn't even try.
</sarcasm>

Another FYI
I also have a 4 Processor Pentium Pro machines with 2GB of EDO memory
that Windows never did support properly, as it was only made by Micron
before they were bought the first time. The machine's serial number for
this particular model is 7. It was developed for NetWare and for SCO
Unix.

This machine has PCI canisters, 4 slots each canister and two canisters
per module, stack-able to 4 modules and 8 PCI canisters total. Windows
doesn't only see 4 slots. NetWare can see 4 canisters and can only use
the first two slots of each canister if all canisters are used. Linux...
doesn't right now what to make of all the canisters, but complains about
unknown hard... but since it was early peering busses and followed the
spec... it can use all 32 pci slots. Micron never really got this
product off the ground and it was killed as soon as they were bought.

Have fun thinking I called you an idiot... which I didn't. I just called
ASUS crazy. As for drivers... stuff that old is included in the kernel
now-a-day. The only stuff being removed is architectures that have not
been made for 7-10+ years, like some of the early 68000 chips, Sparc32
chips (I still have a Sparcstation 5 with one) and the like.

And saying that VIA isn't well supported... Wow. VIA just published
(with an OSI approved license) lotsa code for their stuff, to get better
support for them period. I've also preferred VIA chipsets for many
years.

And as for the comment about the Video card, please understand stranger
things have shown up on my doorstep. Just because its obvious to you,
doesn't mean it *IS* to any one else. I operate under these auspices
when dealing with unknown people and hardware. Some take this as a slap
in the face, but I do it to everyone without exception. I've been bitten
to many times taking things for granted.

It happened yet again this week at my full time job. People hired to do
a job... aren't sometimes doing the things they need to do and are paid
to do, a HARD assumption to swallow when a Full refresh of production
code is to be rolled out and the person in charge of the project doesn't
even realize the scope. Meaning I had to fix everything for him... 10
minutes before the trigger automagically went off. He assumed that we
were just "over writing" the existing code based with deltas (like was
done for years). This meant about 60% of the code wasn't there.

I'm built up my skepticism over the years, from the school of hard
knocks and the ineptitude of the people I sometimes work amongst and the
accidental misdeeds of "promising but not seeing the full picture yet"
people.

I sometimes qualify "*NIX" people based on one - two part question:

        Tell me what terminfo and termcap are, and what do they do or
        define or function as.

Another good question:

        Tell me the differences between: "Spanning Tree Protocol" and
        "Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol"

If you can define those two things for me... without cheating, you'll
get a lot further with me. And no, I am not asking you to do these now
as these are face to face question.
-- 
greg at gregfolkert.net
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