Grobbendonk
10-26-2002, 08:24 AM
Hi there, I'm after a recommendation for a motherboard for a friend (unless we can find answers to the problems below!)
This is someone who wants to try out Linux, hopefully with a view to move off win2k, so we are starting with a dual-boot machine. So far, w2k works fine (well, ok, as expected then) - sees all devices, network and so on.
However, Mandrake 9.0, Red Hat and Suse all struggle with the machine, and we know it's the motherboard/processor because another (older) machine with a different motherboard works fine.
The current mobo is a Soyo Dragon Plus. There are 3 problems it manifests.
1) Linux stops dead when booting, cured by adding ide=nodma (a pain, but acceptable solution)
2) USB won't work. Its detected the correct UHCI thingy, but it locks solid on boot. Adding nousb fixes the problem, but leaves us with no mouse, camera or lego thingy.
3) On board LAN is flaky - we selected the VIA module in Linuxconf (cos it says VIA in the manual), but sometimes it freezes on boot, other times it doesn't find a network, and sometimes it drops the connection without any notice.
Ideally, if going to replace the mobo, we'd like to re-use everything in the machine - memory, chip, graphics card (AGP GeForce 3) etc. Although we do have a couple of network and sound cards lying around, so we don't care about them being on-board.
TIA, Nic
This is someone who wants to try out Linux, hopefully with a view to move off win2k, so we are starting with a dual-boot machine. So far, w2k works fine (well, ok, as expected then) - sees all devices, network and so on.
However, Mandrake 9.0, Red Hat and Suse all struggle with the machine, and we know it's the motherboard/processor because another (older) machine with a different motherboard works fine.
The current mobo is a Soyo Dragon Plus. There are 3 problems it manifests.
1) Linux stops dead when booting, cured by adding ide=nodma (a pain, but acceptable solution)
2) USB won't work. Its detected the correct UHCI thingy, but it locks solid on boot. Adding nousb fixes the problem, but leaves us with no mouse, camera or lego thingy.
3) On board LAN is flaky - we selected the VIA module in Linuxconf (cos it says VIA in the manual), but sometimes it freezes on boot, other times it doesn't find a network, and sometimes it drops the connection without any notice.
Ideally, if going to replace the mobo, we'd like to re-use everything in the machine - memory, chip, graphics card (AGP GeForce 3) etc. Although we do have a couple of network and sound cards lying around, so we don't care about them being on-board.
TIA, Nic