New PC - everything supported by Fedora Core 3 ?

Sun Feb 20 16:23:15 UTC 2005

On Sun, 2005-02-20 at 07:20, Markus Jais wrote:

> 
> CPU: Intel Pentcion 3 GHz  FC.-LGA4, Prescott
> Board: Asus P5GD2  (Sound, G-LAN, IDE RAID, SATA RAID)
> Memory: Kingston Value RAM DIMM 256MB DDR2-533
> Graphic Card: Asus EN6600/TD 256MB, GeForce 6600
> Disk: Western Digital Caviar SE WD2000JD  (200 GB)
> DVD-ROM Plextor PX 116A
> DVD-Burner: Plextor PX-716A (16fach DVD Brenner, Bulk,
> Dual Layer)
> ISDN Karte: AVM Fritz Card PCI 2.1  
> Monitor Iiyama E431S-W (DVI-D, Sound, 72 Hz)
> 
> does anyone know if there are any problems with this
> or is someone already 
> using these items successfully 
> 
> I want to use  Fedora Core 3 

I think you have a slightly different motherboard than the system I am
in the process of setting up.  I have the Asus P5GD2 Deluxe Motherboard
which uses Intel Pentium LGA 775 type processors.  I used an Intel
Pentium 4 560J 3.6Ghz LGA 775 CPU.

I also selected the Plextor PX-716A DVD burner for this unit.  I was
able to boot from the FC3 iso disks and load FC3 using that drive just
fine.  I connected it to the black IDE connector on the front edge of
the mother board.  The only odd thing with this is that FC3 seems to
have identified the drive a /dev/hda.  It also built a /dev/dvd device
which is a link to /dev/hda.  /media/cdrecorder is the mount point used
for this device.  This was not really what I expected.  However I have
successfully used this drive to burn a RW CD just fine.  I have not
played any DVDs on it yet but I think I have the correct options in
fstab now for that.  Trying to get this working with mythtv but still
have work to do on that.

I used the same brand of memory but installed four 512MB sticks.  System
recognized the memory just fine.

I ended up using a Mad Dog FX 5500 PCI based video card.  One error I
made was thinking this board had an AGP slot.  It has a PCI 16 express
slot for a video card.  At some point I may track down a PCI 16 express
video card but for now I am using one of the standard PCI slots for the
video.  Have not used PCI 16 express cards before.

With this combination the Nvidia drivers loaded and worked with very
little trouble.

The biggest problem I had was with the on board ethernet controller. 
The board I have uses a Marvell 88E8053 10/100/1000Base-t chip set.  FC3
out of the box does not recognize this NIC.  I did find a driver that
does work.  Assuming you have the same on board NIC that I did you can
get the correct driver from
http://www.syskonnect.com/sysconnect/support/driver/zip/linux the file
you want is Install-8_13.tar.

To build the driver you will need to setup a soft link to the header
files of the particular version of your kernel as follows:

ln -s /lib/modules/"insert your kernel version here"/build
/usr/src/linux

(replace the quoted portion with your kernel version found in
/lib/modules)

Run the install.sh script for the driver and it will build just fine. 
You can then modprobe for it to test it.  The next time you boot the
interface will be found and you can configure it through that tool as
well.

I have gotten very adept at starting the system in runlevel 3 so I can
rebuild the ethernet drivers and NVIDIA drivers.  :)

I did need to implement the fix for the udev problem in regards to the
nvidia drivers.  Once you have the nvidia drivers install do the
following:

modprobe nvidia
cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices
chown root.root /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*

This is from bugzilla 133900

This is needed so the nvidia drivers will load when you reboot the
system.

I am using only SATA type hard drives (four Maxtor 300GB drives). 
Apparently smartd does not work with SATA drives, or at least not with
these SATA drives.  For now I have just disabled smartd to prevent the
failure message on reboot.

I should also note that my motherboard has two SATA controllers, each
can support 4 SATA hard drives.  The Silicon 3114R controller works out
of the box and saw my hard drives.  Currently have all four hard drives
connected to the Silicon 3114R controller.  Initially I had them split
between the two controllers but the Intel SATA controller did not seem
to see the drivers.  I have since found an option in the bios to
configure that controller for a mode that may work.  I have not tested
that yet other than to change the bios setting.

Note: I am not using this in a raid configuration.  My application for
this box is not that critical (mythtv system), and IMHO using raid
without a hot swap system is silly and wastes a lot of drive space.  As
it is now I have built a 1TB file system using LVM which appears to be
working just fine.

Another issue I had was with the on board audio chip set.  FC3 did not
see it out of the box.  I had to manually load the alsa-driver package. 
Even then the sound card detection utility does not see the audio device
even though alsaconf does find it.  However when I started up mythtv I
get sound just fine.  (please note I am far from an audiophile so the
quality may not be there and I have not tried to use the multiple
speaker outputs that are available, just the one output to some poor PC
speakers.)

I have not tackled the on board wireless interface yet.  First look
however there does not seem to be much in the way of native support for
the on board wireless chipset.  It looks like another Marvell chipset. 
lspci -v gives me this for what I believe to be the wireless controller.

01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.: Unknown
device 1fa7 (rev 07)
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.: Unknown device 138f
        Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
        Memory at bfec0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Memory at bfe90000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

I took a brief look at the Linuxant site to see if they had support for
this chip set.  So far I have not found anything definitive on their
site saying they support this particular chip set.  I am leaving this
for later once I have mythtv fully functional.

I also installed a Hauppage PVR-350 card in this box.  I am working
through some minor config issues with the remote control and the DVD
support within mythtv.  But I will hopefully have most of that sorted
out in the next week.

I did play with the hyperthreading support.  Using the SMP kernel you
essentially get two CPUs in the one processor.  You can see that using
the top command and pressing the 1 (one) key to show both CPU's stats. 
It is even more impressive when you run two copies of setiathome.  Each
one will use half your CPU resources which you can see via the system
monitor tool.

Have not run any benchmarks at this point but I have to say the whole
system feels much faster than anything else I have used.

Sorry for the long winded response.  Had planned on doing a write up on
this system at some point as I did not find many people using this
particular motherboard.  Still plan on doing that once I get the other
parts of the system working such as the wireless support.

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

You can't take damsel here now. 