Without research I purchased the ECS KA3 MVP motherboard AMD Athlon 64
AM2 combo from NewEgg.
This seems like a very nice MB in many respects but I have encountered
two problems.
First, Standard CMOS Features does not list my dvdrw and cdrw drives.
There are two ide headers on the board labeled ide1 and ide2 and I have
two hard drives attached to ide1 and the dvdrw and cdrw drives attached
to ide2. Only the hard drives are listed when I access BIOS Standard
CMOS Features. On boot up the dvdrw and cdrw drives are shown as being
at ODD0 and ODD1. Result: No entries in /dev for hdc and hdd so I can't
mount these devices.
Second, there are two onboard LAN chipsets, Agere E13101 and Realtek
8100C. The kernel configuration for linux-source-2.6.18 includes an
entry under onboard controllers for Realtek RTL-8129/8130/8139 which I
have selected as module. With this choice dmesg reports:
eth0: Identified 8139 chip type 'RTL-8100B/8139D'
eth0: link down
ADDRCONF (NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
Result: I can't reach the internet from this system.
Perhaps this is all my fault. If ODD0 and ODD1 are a new standard way
of recognizing cd and dvd devices there may be a way other than from
/dev entries to mount and use these drives. I have read
Documentation/icd.txt and tried /DEV ./MAKEDEV hdc but this did not
immediately solve my problem.
Also there may also be another setting needed to use the onboard lan
chip sets which I do not understand.
I have and could install a pci ethernet card if I need to download
additional programs.
I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or sources of information
which would help me make this motherboard usable for Debian Linux.