[SLUG] OK, new motherboard, thoughts

[Paul Teasdale]

On Saturday 29 Apr 2006 11:03, john at johnallsopp.co.uk wrote:

Hi John,
>
> OK. Well that was a rollercoaster few days but I think I might be
> getting back on track. Now about this bloody Linux installation, what
> thoughts you about buying this:
>
> <http://uk.giga-byte.com/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?Produc
>tID=1883&ModelName=GA-K8N%20Pro-SLI>
>
> Is nvidia the one that works?
>
The motherboard in my newest PC is a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI.

http://uk.giga-byte.com/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=1859&ModelName=GA-K8NXP-SLI

Comparing the specs they are very similar other than mine has a few extra 
features and accessories.

With slightly older versions of the kernel (e.g. 2.6.8) some things do not 
work 'out-of-the-box' on this motherboard unless you install a newer kernel 
via whatever method.

With kernel 2.6.12 or higher (using Debian) everything does work apart from 
one of the onboard NIC ports.

I have also installed SUSE 10 on a test partition and it all works including 
the both NIC ports (proving it could be made to work under Debian but I only 
need one NIC port and so haven't bothered getting the other to work). 
Furthermore I did not need to start adding any additional drivers except for 
the official NVidia graphics driver but that was my choice. You may not even 
have a NVidia graphics card but I would recommend one.

There are a few things I have not tested such as SLI functionality but I 
personally don't really need them. SLI may be overkill but in my case I did 
some work for a friend and he bought me the motherboard which was nice.

Funnily enough my motherboard came with a PCI wireless LAN card also which I 
did not know was in the box before the motherboard was bought (a Gigabyte 
GN-WPKG 802.11 b/g wireless card). In my experience wireless LAN cards are 
difficult to get going under Linux and most are poorly supported. It turned 
out that the card has a Ralink 2500 chipset on it which, after installing and 
compiling drivers, does work extremely well under Linux 
(http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/).

> Hmm, that red message at the bottom of
> <http://uk.giga-byte.com/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ClassValue
>=Motherboard&ProductID=1883&ProductName=GA-K8N%20Pro-SLI> doesn't look too
> good. What do we think that means? That's kinda
> worrying .. am I going to get to a place where I can't boot the thing
> up and don't know how to install the driver?
>
I read that as Gigabyte don't officially support Linux but they are not trying 
to put you off totally by saying you could potentially download the correct 
drivers from chipset vendors websites and therefore use Linux.

In my experience if you go for a new enough kernel you should find it supports 
most of the motherboard functionality without any additional faffing around 
as I have said above.

> The CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2200MHz. The above board is in the
> PC Pro A List.
>
That's what my processor is too which is fine.

Regards,
Paul.
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