Ron Johnson wrote:
On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 23:52, Kent West wrote:Hanasaki JiJi wrote:What motherboards have people had success/failures with for woody and sarge and Bartons with a 400fsb?Which mobo chipsets have you had good/bad experiences with? amd? nvidia? via? kt600?And with which kernels? I guess the woody distribution kernel would need to run ok because that is the public ISO available?Thank you.I was just tonight trying to help a friend install Debian on his mobo with an nforce (nvidia) ethernet chipset. Suffice it to say that I will _never_ purchase an nvidia-based mobo, unless something major comes along to change my mind.What kernel version?
2.4.22-xfs originally (from Knoppix) 2.4.22-1-k7 (acquired from sid)I also tried upgrading to 2.6-test9 (acquired from sid), and that just froze my box; now I can't even boot back into 2.4.22 without the box freezing. I haven't had a chance to troubleshoot/fix yet. I'll get to that today.
Having said that, I need to qualify that the only installation media I had available was Knoppix 3.2 (or 3.3 - I forget). I was going to use it to hit the network long enough to download the few files necessary for a hard-drive based install of the base system and then bring the rest of the system up from the network, but the nic didn't work in Knoppix (although the nforce sound worked just fine). So I resorted to doing a Knoppix-based install, so there may be some bastardization in the box. I'm uncomfortable with the box being built on Knoppix (I had to manually create/move partitions around after the installation in order to segment them the way I like; I suspect I've got non-pure-Debian packages installed, etc), and am thinking about redoing it after I can get my hands on a Woody install CD.
Eventually I took the Netgear (tulip) nic out of another box temporarily and put it in this box, tweaked my /etc/apt/sources.list to get rid of all but stable and unstable references, did an apt-get update, and then installed the 2.4.22-1-k7 kernel, hoping that Debian's version had support for the nforce nic chipset. Nope. So I took a shot with the 2.6-test9 kernel, and started having the lockups (early in the boot process).
Before trying the 2.6 kernel, I tried downloading the nforce driver from http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-0248.html and just got quickly frustrated. It's a proprietary driver; the binary drivers aren't for Debian; the source drivers won't build (probably my ignorance - I tried it, found some errors, thought maybe I should download the kernel-source package, got lost, blah blah blah - still no working nic). In short, I came to despise nvidia, first for not releasing their [driver code/chipset specs] so that the Linux folks who know what they're doing could package it into Debian (or the kernel, as appropriate), and second for not having Debian drivers [1], and third for not documenting for idiots like myself how to get the source driver compiled and installed.
The final result is that I'm currently strongly biased against nvidia; I expect to never buy nvidia-based mobos, nor nvidia-based video cards, and I expect to badmouth them whenever the opportunity arises. They may be the technical best (and they may not be - I don't know), but I don't care to do business with them.
----[1] It seems to me that hardware manufacturers would be smart to forget about producing binary drivers for Redhat or Mandrake, etc, and either produce drivers that work on Knoppix (which can function as sort of a universal standard - hardware reviewers then wouldn't have to test for "Linux compatability" and then qualify that statement to mean "Redhat compatible with third-party drivers"; they could instead throw in a Knoppix CD and test for Knoppix compatibility and publish those results), or better yet, produce drivers that work on Debian, as it is well known that Debian is the most philosophically pure Linux distro, and if it works on Debian, it can work on any distro whether third-party drivers are available on that distro or not.
Okay, thus ends my morning ranting. -- Kent