On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 06:12:10PM +0100, Gianluca Insolvibile wrote: > Respected gentoo-ers, > > first off, apologies for the slightly OT question. > > I'm considering buying an ASUS A7N8x (Del) motherboard, based on the > nForce2 chipset. As far as I understood, some features (UltraATA, > SerialATA, sound, network) of this chipset are not directly supported by > the kernel and binary-only modules by nVidia are needed. Google searches > provided me with confusing info on this matter. Has anyone had direct > experience with an nForce2-based system running gentoo-patched kernels ?
I'm running Gentoo on the A7N8X Deluxe, and several of these boxes have been used to demo Gentoo at tradeshows. Since the chipset is very new, there's some tricky aspects to getting everything to work, but it's all doable. UltraATA is the thoughest part of it all. You can install a system with a standard kernel, but IDE will not run at full speed, occasionally crash the system, or both. The default Gentoo 1.4_rcX kernel includes a driver that'll run reliable on this motherboard at UDMA100. If you've got a UDMA-133 harddisk, I can get you a driver that runs UDMA133 as well. SerialATA -- I think it works, but realisticly... who cares at this point in time? By the time Serial ATA disks become affordable, the driver issues will be long solved. Sound -- Works fine with the standard kernel drivers. There's a few websites that tells you how to setup modules.conf to load it correctly. There's a commercial sound driver available from opensound.com ($35) which will give you full surround sound and digital out. Networking -- both ports work with minor effort. The nVidia port needs an nVidia driver, which is simple to download and install. The 3COM port needs a recent version of the kernel or a simple patch to the kernel sources. Alain -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
