Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $200.00 | Rating: 7
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Kernel (uname -r):
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2.6.22.1
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Distribution:
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Slackware 12
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This is one of high-end Asus motherboard for Intel processors. It ships with a ton of connectivity options and the high-end Intel 975X chipset. The ones who wants to keep their old hard drives will be happy to learn there is 2 IDE connectors which mean you can plug up to 4 PATA devices.<br><br>However, the Linux installation was not as straightforward as it should have been. The guilty parts are the ICH7R southbridge and the JMicron JMB363 controler. The latter one extends the numbers of SATA connectors and has RAID capability and handles the second PATA connector. I have one SATA disk plugged to the ICH7R, one DVD burner and one DVD reader plugged to the PATA connector of the ICH7R and 2 PATA hard disks plugged to the JMicron controler. The symptoms are the following:<br><ul><li>When probing the connected devices to the ICH7R, it hangs for about 30 seconds trying to probe and detect non-existant SATA devices. The Slackware installation program also had some troubles to find the device in which the DVD was inserted; this was solved by forcing it to probe the good device (/dev/hda1 in my case). This is still not fixed.<br></li><li>I have 2 PATA hard disk drives plugged on the JMicron controler and the kernel took ages to scan the disks then find the partitions. Shortly after having done this, it would just hang indefinetly trying to probe some hardware. This is fixeable.<br></li></ul>However I was able to find some workaround to make it working properly. The first thing I did since the JMicron stuff seemed to block all the kernel loading stuff was to disable it in the BIOS. Then, the kernel loaded properly and I was able to install the Slackware. I googled to find an answer to my problem and then find some on this very site, other on the Hardware part of the Gentoo wiki. The whole point seemed to give the kernel an "irqpoll" argument and setting-up the JMicron chipset in AHCI mode in the BIOS.<br><br>I grabed the latest kernel from kernel.org and recompile it by myself and began to play with compilation options. I first activated the new libATA stack, compiled the relevant option in the kernel (ie: AHCI ATA support, Intel ICH support), set-up as modules the JMicron_pata, silicon image SATA and Intel PATA MPIIX support. I also had to set-up the SCSI CDROM support to have working DVD readers without conflicting with the old PATA stack.<br>Then I told the LILO to add the "irqpoll" option in the append section and it worked well.<br><br>I have to add that it seems that turning off the computer issues some error messages with the disk drives as described at http://linux-ata.org/shutdown.html so it might not be working perfectly but at least it is working for what wanted.<br>I did not try any RAID option nor other advanced stuff. I did not try the Wifi option neither, it may be quite troublesome since the Wifi chipset is connected on the USB bus and not even supported by Windows Vista.<br><br><br>To summarize this I would rate the Linux support of this motherboard as decent if you have some knowledge of the Linux kernel configuration and hardware handling, especially knowing that Ubuntu 6.10 did not managed to load at all with this hardware (and there was no way to get any text output) and Mandriva 2007 was not able to load the JMicron module. <br>However, if you are totally new to Linux and you don't have the most cutting edge distribution (ie with at least a 2.6.18 kernel) I think you should try another motherboard without the JMicron chipset.<br>
If you also use Windows, this motherboard works perfectly and it might atone the trouble you may encouter on Linux.<br><br>However, set aside the OS related troubles, the motherboard is worth your money: you have every single connector you may ever want to use, the only stuff you really need to plug on it are a Core 2 CPU, 2 Gigs of RAM, a Hard disk and a decent graphic card and that's all. There is also some niceties such as (poor) translations of the BIOS interface, the possibility to display an image (640*480*16 * cough*) from the POST to the moment it will try to find something to boot on, a remote control able to boot your PC, some Wifi options, a totally fanless heatsink...<br><br>So far I'm pretty happy with this motherboard. I give it a 7 for the shaky Linux support, it would have been a 9 if the JMicron controler was working out of the box.<br>
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