A7V, LNE100TX, SuSE 7.1 resolution
Mike McCann
I'm happy to say that I've finally got the A7V network system working.
I'm taking some time to write this to share what worked for me and
hopefully this will help some other Linux venturers.
I'm not quite done with this installation andif there is anyone whom can
help
me I would appreciate your help.
My system
A7V motherboard
1GHz Thunderbird Athlon
384MBRam
Radeon all-in-wonder
guillemot maxi-sound Fortissimo
Cottin-picken Linksys LNE100TX (actually it wasn't the problem)
Suse 7.1 2.2.18
40G Maxtor 7200rpm (currently sitting on the ata66 ide port
dvd/cd-rom toshiba
cd-r/w ricoh
The symptoms were the nic card and sound card were not configurable. On
further investigation I saw that the VIA bridge controllers and such
were not
properly discovered. After I had successfully loaded RH7 on a dos
partition
using information from http://www.geocities.com/ender7007/index.html, I
had
decided to install Suse just released 7.1. I had no luck installing
kernel
2.4, so then I tried to install 2.2.18. I then could not get any other
device
to work. I tried Ashley's method for the nic card,
www.suse.com/~ashley,
however it didn't work. I followed Linksys methods, it didn't work.
(mostly,
because it didn't seem to have lx_suse package.
So, as often when one puts together thier own torture machine, computer,
I
went and checked the drivers and bios. Asus still has the same version
as
they did in January. But if you haven't done that, go to the site, look
up the A7V motherboard, from there the driver hot-links are available.
I did find a great little site called http://www.amdmb.com, it has the
latest AMD bios update.
I did notice that there were four devices loaded on IRQ # 5. Using KDE
System Control -- Device Manager one can easily view what's not properly
configured. One question on that, I have the nic card running however
the Device Manager still says that some of the motherboard controllers
are unresolved. If someone can confirm whether this is acceptable and a
short coming of the software, I would appreciate it.
After reading the manual on A7V, I found that the bios assigns the IRQ
by the slot position. So, I moved the card to the slot 3 instead of slot
5. And found that in Windows 98 that all the IRQs redistribute, and
this time more evenly.
So a couple of you helpfuls out there suggested using the Suse 7.0 eide
boot
disk. I down loaded it, wrote it to a floppy and re-installed 7.1. It
didn't work for kernel 2.4. It sorted of worked for 2.2.18. Sort
of --- what does sort of mean??????????
Well, as-is, it didn't let me add the nic card. So I checked dmesg and
/var/messages. I found that everything was looking in
/lib/modules/2.2.16/.... . Well, since I was loading 2.2.18 and I used
a promise eide boot disk from Suse 7.0, something in it's little brain
processes due to the boot disk was trying to point everything to the
/lib/modules/2.2.16/.... directories. So I took a simple gamble,
created a /lib/modules/2.2.16 directory and copied the
/lib/modules/2.2.18 subdirectories to the 2.2.16 directory. It worked.
So what was the actual problem here. I bet Suse 7.1 set needs to have a
promise/eide boot disk.
Now if someone can help me upgrade to 2.4.X kernel I would appreciate
it. I tried that and the boot process said edba too big or something
like that.
resources
http://comp.os.linux.hardware
http://comp.os.linux.networking
http://alt.linux.suse
http://www.amdmb.com (great site for AMD and motherboard talk)
http://www.suse.com/~ashley
http://www.scyld.com/diag
http://www.suse.com (use thier support knowledge database)
http://www.asus.com products - motherboards - slot A - a7v
http://www.promise.com
http://www.linksys.com
So, I'll keep plugging away. Hope this helps
Mike
mm...@home.com.no-spam