Warning- long post I must confess to having been bemused and amused when Civileme ranted on Mandrake Forum against the ECS k7s5a motherboard he had purchased a month or so ago. He had terrible problems with all the devices on his board using IRQ 11 and the Bios being "brain dead".
My own experience with that board was the opposite. All my devices were autodetected by LM8.1 and all the irq lines were nicely distributed. The only problem I had was the on board sound not working, but that was expected because it was a new unsupported chip set. But then I decided to spash out �15 on a PCI sound card. Having learned years ago with Windows NEVER to buy anything other than Creative sound cards I installed an SB128 (OK maybe today other sound cards are alright, but old wounds cut deep) On booting into LM8.1 I was pleased to find that my sound card worked perfectly first time, (that's why I buy Creative) The bad news is that now the onboard sound was disabled my pcmcia wireless networking card now appeared on irq10 and refused to work despite there being no irq conflict. Then I discovered Civileme was right and the 'brain dead' bios prevented me from forcing irq lines, and any attempt to force an irq in the linux pcmcia config was doomed. Eventually I found that by putting the wireless card in a certain slot, and so long as usb is enabled, then the wireless card the usb, and the sound card would all share irq11 and would work. Great...... but now I find that if I open an NFS file share, and for example play some MP3 files which are on a VFAT partition on another computer, then after 2 or 3 minutes NFS locks up, and I have to reset both computers. So it looks like either Mandrake 8.1 has a bug sharing VFAT partitions over NFS with XFS fle system in use, or (more likely) I have an irq problem with sound and lan sharing the same irq line. So if Civileme or anyone else can suggest a way of forcing either sound or LAN to use a different irq in defiance of the Bios, I would love to hear of it. derek
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