Well, My older PC got somewhat fried, and I replaced the mobo and accessories with the following.
* LeadTek WinFast K7NCR18GM mobo (based on the Nvidia Nforce2 chipset with an integrated GeForce 4 mx GPU - with a nice little SPDIF & nView bracket for second display device (TV/Monitor)) * 512 Megs of DDR SDRAM (PC 2700 - running at 333 mhz) * AMD Athlon XP 2600+ CPU * A 40GB Seagate hdd (ST340014A - 7200 RPM) (I also bought an extra fan for the cabinet to keep things cool) ..to begin with, I started off with a MDK 9.1 install (and completed a full install in around 12 minutes :-D) I chose to use XFS as the file system (which really rocks - y'all should try it out) I installed the Nvidia video drivers - they recognised the graphics card without any hitch. (II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU detected as: GeForce4 MX Integrated GPU (--) NVIDIA(0): VideoBIOS: 04.1f.00.07.00 (--) NVIDIA(0): VideoRAM: 16384 kBytes (II) NVIDIA(0): Connected display device(s): CRT-0, TV-0 (--) NVIDIA(0): Detected TV Encoder: NVIDIA ..anyway, then after some poking around with the various hdparm options, the best hdd data transfer rate I could get was 26-27 mbps. However, I could not get the integrated ethernet device to work (even the RPM downloaded from nvidia.com did not work properly) The audio was also sounding terrible (with both the normal OSS drivers and the NVIDIA drivers) - everything I played sounded like extremely low bit rate MP3s. I was beginning to feel a little disappointed, and then I googled a bit and decided to upgrade to the latest 2.4x kernel - 2.4.22 Since I was using XFS, I had the patch the source of the stock kernel downloaded from kernel.org - and downloaded the CK patchset from http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/, which includes, among other goodies, the XFS patchset. I compiled and installed the new kernel, and rebooted. Once the new kernel had booted up, just for fun, I tried out hdparm -tT /dev/hda (without any previous tweaking), and to my utter surprise, this time, the data transfer was around 58 mbps. Cool!! I downloaded the Nforce driver tarballs from nvidia.com, and compiled and installed them. The ethernet device now worked fine with the DIAS connection. Nice.... Now, the only issue left was the sound. The nvaudio module, when loaded into the new kernel froze the whole system :-( - so it was clearly not an option. The sound with the driver provided with the kernel sounded terrible. So I decided to try out ALSA. I downloaded the latest ALSA drivers (0.9.8), and compiled and installed them. The audio output still sounded funny - it was going way too fast now. After some RTFM, head scratching, and grepping, I modified the sound section of /etc/modules.conf to look like this ################### ### Sound Stuff ### ################### # ALSA portion alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0 options snd-intel8x0 ac97_clock=47470 # OSS/Free portion alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0 alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss ## End Sound Stuff ## Apparently the "options snd-intel8x0 ac97_clock=47470" did the trick. ..anyway, now I had become more ambitious and tried to enable the channel for rear speakers for the sound output. I had not been able to do that with the drivers from nvidia, so I was not very hopeful. I did an urpmi alsa-utils, and fired up alsamixer. There were control sliders for all the channels, and even for a 3D surround mode, and they were all muted. I unmuted them - and all channels worked absolutely perfectly. (if required the other two channels should also work properly) Great!! (there are also some fancy dolby thingies that I cannot test - as I don't have the required hw setup) so ..now the box is chugging along nicely, with GNOME 2.4 having 8 workspaces with all kind of apps running in them. :-D Next, I intend to play around with that extra TV Out thingy provided with the mobo - hopefully that will also work properly. I hear that there are some issues with USB in this mobo (probably USB 2.0 problems) - and Indra-da (Indranil Dasgupta) is struggling with getting Apcupsd to work with an APC UPS with an USB interface. If anyone wants my kernel .config file, please mail me offlist. -cheers- sdg PS: If anyone on LIH replies to this - please CC me - I am in vacation mode. ** Disclaimer: This has been tested only in a MDK 9.1 box. ** ** Use the information provided in this at your own risk ** -- In The Beginning, there was nothing.... ....which exploded. -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
