Franki wrote:
> Anyone know anything about the PCchips or the Transcend???
Don't know about the Transcend. I believe the PCchips is a "generic"
motherboard sold under several brand names. I'd bet it is the same as
the Alton M/B 810 LMR, and very similar to the Matsonic MS8308.
At a computer show about three months ago, I bought the Matsonic MS8308,
because it was about $9 less than the Alton (about $69). The Matsonic
does not have an on-board modem, which I did not want anyway. (For $10
I could have bought a modem that was almost on-board -- the motherboard
has a special socket for a special modem.)
The Alton and Matsonic modems (and the PCChips modem -- the M in the LMR
tell you that it has an on board modem, the L means Lan (on board 10/100
Ethernet), and the R I can't recall right now) are Winmodems. I have no
idea whether there are Linux drivers for these particular Winmodems.
Before I go any further, let me say that I like the motherboard, but not
everyone will.
It has on-board video, sound, and 10/100 Ethernet. We (my son and I)
installed Mandrake 7.2 with MandrakeFreq after attempting to install the
beta 3 of Mandrake 8.0. (The problem had to do with the configuration
of X.)
Nice things about the board:
Inexpensive
Built in video (SiS 730/630) with AGP interface, plus an AGP socket if
you want to upgrade to a better AGP card. (The SiS 730/630 is probably
not the fastest, but we haven't done any fps benchmarks.) We are
running Mandrake 7.2 with the generic SVGA driver. (IIUC, the SiS
drivers for 3.3.6 and 4.0.2 support the SiS 630, but the driver for
4.0.3 does not support the 630 -- go figure! When we set up 7.2 it
chose the SVGA driver, and after our problems with 8.0 decided not to
fool around for now -- just accept it.) If you plug a better card into
the AGP socket you can (must?) disable the on board video in the Bios
setup.
Built in sound that works in Mandrake 7.2 (don't recall the chip
designation). (We had previously used a predecessor of this motherboard
called the TX-Pro II. We could never get the on board sound module to
work under Linux (works fine in Windows).) Again, you can disable the
on board sound in the Bios setup. (PS: The reason we needed to upgrade
is to get more memory -- the TX-Pro II has only two DIMM sockets, which
can only handle 64 MB each. The Matsonic has two that can handle 256 MB
each, and I think the Alton has three (at 256 MB each). IME(xperience),
Linux needs far more memory than Windows.)
We disabled the onboard Lan (Ethernet 10/100) because our home Ethernet
still uses coax.
If you think about disabling the on board stuff, note that the Matsonic
only has two PCI sockets and one AGP socket. (I don't recall if the
Alton has 2 + 1 sockets, but I know it does not have 5, 6, or 7.)
Back to the video. I think (my opinion only, and I'm quite a newbie to
Linux) that the problem has to do with the setup -- maybe the system
reports that it is using an SiS 730/630 driver, and Mandrake doesn't
recognize it, and throws up its hands and quits. It gives a message
something like "... not found in" (database?) ... and does not let us
complete the installation. (Well actually, it may have completed the
non-graphic installation because we were able to boot up, and we might
have been able to set up X "manually" -- but we punted and went back to
Mandrake 7.2.) As I understand it, the chipset is a 730 but the video
portion of it is the same as the 630.
Good luck, hope this helps!
Randy Kramer
