[WBEL-users] Athlon64 AMD64 motherboard recommendation

[Connie Sieh]

Scott,

On Fri, 6 Aug 2004 Mace.Scott@tatravelcenters.com wrote:

> I too have an Nforce2 board, and your assertion is misleading.  There is 

These answers are based on 754 motherboards.  The 939 based motherboards 
have not been out very long and I thus suspect that there is not many who 
have used one.

Bob is asking about Whitebox as this is a Whitebox mailing list and not
Gentoo.  I totally agree with Kirby.  The nforce2 support in Whitebox and
all the other Enterprise rebuilds is not good.  This is not the fault of
these rebuilt releases but of the code provided by RedHat.  Sure there are
drivers from Nvidia and even some fairly new "free"  drivers.  I think it
is misleading to tell someone that the support is great but only after
having to download and figure out how to install lots of "stuff".

Now to answer the original question.  I think that out of the box there
are lots of drivers missing for a nforce2 motherboard for Whitebox and Tao
and the other rebuilds .  I have a SOYO nforce2 box with a added ethernet
because I need to be able to test installs of Tao and Scientific Linux(the
release that I am working on).  It does not help me to know there may be
drivers out there somewhere, I need them in the release. The SOYO
motherboard also has APIC issues. These seem not specific to the SOYO but
to the nforce2.

The VIA chipset motherboards seem to be alot better.  The Gigabyte VIA
based motherboard does not seem to have any driver issues.  Have not tried
sound though.

-Connie Sieh
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

> full ethernet support using the forcedeth driver.  Alsa supports the 
> sound, but it won't do hardware mixing.  My firewire port seems to be 
> supported, and working, however I don't have firewire devices I can use to 
> test.  I would suspect that the same would hold true for the Nforce3 
> boards.  I am using Gentoo on that box, and kernel 2.6.7  Forcedeth is 
> available as source, so getting the driver working on another kernel 
> should be simple.  Alsa will certainly work on the 2.4 series.
> 
> =========================
> Scott Mace
> Systems Administrator
> Travelcenters of America
> 440-808-4318
> mace.scott@tatravelcenters.com
> =========================
> 
> 
> 
> Kirby Bohling <kbohling@birddog.com> 
> Sent by: whitebox-users-admin@beau.org
> 08/05/2004 07:17 PM
> 
> To
> rramstad@alum.mit.edu
> cc
> whitebox-users@beau.org
> Subject
> Re: [WBEL-users] Athlon64 AMD64 motherboard recommendation
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > I'm leaning towards NForce3 based boards, as these seem to be really
> > common, but I'm wondering if the built in stuff, like Ethernet, is
> > easy to enable and configure.
> > 
> 
>                  I can't speak directly to NForce3's, but I have an 
> NForce2 that
> takes IA32 AMD chips.  Nvidia is very proud of their secret
> Ethernet, Sound and Firewire chipsets.  So there's no support for
> them under Linux without binary only drivers.  Nvidia is generally
> pretty good about releasing updated drivers for their video cards
> that are kernel neutral, and I use those.
> 
>                  I hate binary only drivers that are kernel specific as 
> I'm at
> the mercy of my vendor.  So I'd recommend checking to be sure the
> chipsets are supported via the default drivers in WBEL.  I'd be
> absolutely shocked if they are.
> 
>                  Thanks,
>                                  Kirby
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