This is really a great board, however it does have one compatibility issue. First, it is very fast, very stable and includes a lot of onboard features. It has many BIOS options for overclocking. I have installed Mandrake 9.1 and Slackware 9/9.1 on this board with no trouble. Everything was autodetected during install on both accounts even the Firewire ports. It definitely does best out of the box with >=2.4.22 kernel. Previous kernel versions will require some tweaking, mostly to get UDMA working properly. My USB mouse worked right off the bat, though I don't have any USB 2.0 devices to test.

Nvidia provides drivers for this board here. The driver package includes the nvnet module necessary for Nvidia's onboard LAN. I advise against using the nvgart module from thier driver package unless you own an Nvidia vid card. For ATI use the nVidia AGP chipset module provided in the Linux kernel. The 3Com device module is included in any recent kernel (3c59x).

There's 1 problem I can attest to. The integrated audio, while it has great sound reproduction, only supports sound output from 1 app at a time. i.e. If I am playing mp3's with xmms, I won't hear any alerts from my IM program, incomming email, or anything else for that matter. I searched pretty hard on this issue, and I found no solution short of nvidia writing better drivers. I wound up buying an Audigy-- Problem solved.

6.22.04 UPDATE
Here is a link to a post that outlines using dmix on nforce2 mobos to provide software mixing that will eliminate the sound output problem described above: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=168223&highlight=dmix

It is refreshing that Nvidia provides Linux drivers for this product, even if they aren't totally up to par.

Overall excellent motherboard!

Red Hat Linux had lots of problems, I finally gave up with RH and tried SuSE. It installed beautifully. I'm having problems I expected (just need to install a few drivers for odd items). I am also very happy to report that there were a few problems I expected that I didn't have. The sound works, which the graphics work but are not in 3d mode, haven't tried to get that working yet (I have the Nvidia GeForce FX 5200).

I have a wireless PS2 mouse that didn't work during the installation process, but it eventually autoconfigured it and that is working also.

Nvidia drivers for lan port : www.nvidia.com

Nvidia drivers needed for lan : www.nvidia.com

Install goes fine for Mandrake 9.1/9.2 for me, however heavy disk activity over a period of time (say, copying the 9.2 ISOs from one spot to another on disk) will bring the system to a hard lock. I have tried the -tmb kernels and updated Mandrake kernels with no luck.

I have also tried Fedora 1 and Libranet 2.8. Neither of those seem to have the crashing problems, so I suppose there is a patch in the Mandrake kernel that is causing this issue.

All in all, the board is wonderful. Combined with a athlon 2600+ and Geforce 5600, it's quite quick :-) I just hope that it gets to the point where it will run Mandrake without these problems.

Hez

Where do i start?? hummmm
Lets seee, first the install if found all the hardware fine but refused to install packages. check MD5 sums and reburned same problem. finaly i did a minimal install and it kinda went through fine. Now in KDE the system hangs, freezes, lock, every so often. yes it does it when there is high disk activity. so i went to the boards and found out that i need to add pci=noapci and so on so i did. worked for a day and then started crashing again but this time even more, sometimes it didn't want to boot at all. after that i installed the nvidia drivers, woooooooooow, ran like a charm for 24 hours. Then when i was listening to wav files on the system to determain which one to use for my incoming email notofication, boom, it lock, dead, nothing, stuck, no keyboard no mouse, nothing at all. reseted and it didn't want to boot at all this time. So now what? buy another board? i don't think so. install another distro, but if they use the same kernel won't that do the same thing? if you guys can let me know of anything that would be great.
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
1gb ram
80 gb wd hd
16 gb wb hd
12 gb wd hd
ASUS 52X CD
Plextor 40XCD-r
Sound Blaster Audigy
Adabtec SCSI Card
Jazz drive 2gb
USB zip 250
HP PSC 750

and now back to Windows XP :P
I really do hate windows, big time!!!

No problems with install. Getting 6 - ch sound working on the Realtek ALC650 onboard audio has not been accomplished. Getting the NVIDIA LAN working wasn't too bad, with the help of this forum. Overall I like this Motherboard quite a bit.

Asus.com's support site claims that nvidia linux drivers dont work with this card.
I only need to activate nvidia lan, coz the other stuff is included in kernel yet.
Suggestions?

This is the Hardware Compatibility Forum. Questions like this would be better asked in the Hardware forum of the Questions section. However, the link I provided in the first review of this board will take you to the Nvidia site where the Linux drivers are located, including the nvnet module for the onboard LAN.

I know it's been said but I'll say again, this is a great board. Fedora Core 1 likes it too.

No problems with Mandrake 9.2 download edition on Asus' A7N8X Deluxe rev 1.4 (BIOS 1.06). All onboard peripherals were detected such as onboard sound, nVidia and 3Com NICs, and an nVidia video card (MSI 4200 Ti).

Was able to update nVidia drivers for the MSI video card. Now the 3d hardware acceleration is enabled.

This is a great board for Mandrake 9.2. Have not encountered any lockups or freezes.
======================================
Update 2004-04-04
======================================
Well I guess I spoke too soon. Yes there were no lockups or freezes if all I did was check e-mails, surf the web, and/or play XMMS.

HOWEVER, as soon as I started using the PC for more serious stuff such as programming/compiling Java apps using Borland's JBuilder X, with Evolution, Mozilla, Kate editor, and Nautilus opened all at once, I started encountering lockups/freezes. Occurs more frequently in KDE than in GNOME. I suspect it might have something to do with memory usage and/or swap disk usage/activity.

I have now shelved plans to build another PC based on an nForce2 motherboard dedicated to Linux (Mandrake 10) until I'm sure that this problem has been resolved.
======================================
Update 2004-04-17
======================================
Based on suggestions from others in this forum and others I seen on the web, I added "noapic" and "nolapic" and removed all traces of "apci=ht" on the Append section of the /etc/lilo.conf file and so far no lockups even when stressing the PC. I will keep folks posted if this truly fixes the lockups on this board.
======================================
Update 2004-04-24
======================================
I got another lockup this morning... just checking e-mails and surfing. The lockups have been minimized since I added the noapic nolapic paramterers in lilo, but as I just found out this morning, not completely eliminated.

As a result of this, my next Linux PC will probably be built on an Intel based motherboard despite my preferrence for AMD.

Aside that nVidias drivers are not GPL and are not even open in some cases leading to black boxes that might break and nobody knows where, and nobody supports and nobody can fix, this motherboard gave me very, very bad results and I wouldn't recomend anyone to buy this product.
It gave me random crashes in the 3 distributions I mentioned with diferen sets of HDs, CD-ROMS, keyboard/mouse, etc.
I really really regret ever having bought this, I'm selling this and buying something different.
Good luck.

the only complaint I have with this board is the built in sound seems to stop working after 3 days of uptime I can't find no reason for it but it just won't make a noise

Overall the mobo is great, but I HAD TO use the following kernel parameters:
noapic nolapic
or I would get tons of lock-ups.

I had no problems with this configuration. Not even lock-ups with apic as in the the previous post.

After putting together the hardware, I tried to install Debian since that is my preferred distro. Unfortunately, there is no nForce NIC support in 3.0r2 which means that, unless you have all the CD's, you won't complete the install.

Gentoo installed just fine though. The Gentoo community is a bit more aggressive with supporting hardware and I found that using a simple modprobe command allowed me to proceed. Eventually I got everything working with Gentoo.

Install went very smooth, and I didn't have to download any drivers from nVidia's site.

After a while, though, I did end up having to disable apic due to occasional freezes.

This board has worked quite well for me.

The only things thas I noticed were that the ethernet wasnt detected for me during my Slack install and that I had to use my Davicom PCI card for ethernet. All in all its a nice board with a bunch of built in feeatures that all work nicely I understand with the drivers provided on the Nvidia website (nForce2 controllers).

6 PCI, 6 USB, 2 SATA avaliable if thats your thing (mmmm SATA). Its a jam packed board. I'd rate it higher (10) if my ethX was detected during installs though.

it's a great mainboard, everything works well. i had some SATA driver issues (gave errors when making the initrd), but that's because I compiled SCSI/SATA support in the kernel. i've compiled the kernel with SATA/SCSI as modules and it worked great

by the way, the mainboard makes a strange whining noise. under windows i only get this when booting windows, transferring data over the COM port or when I run Prime95. under Linux the mainboard makes this noise all thie time. there's also a ghosting noise on the audio channel: under windows it's not loud at all, but under linux once again i get a whining noise all the time

No problem of any sort with SuSE 9.1. Both onboard ethernet ports and the onboard sound worked with no issues.

UPDATE:
EDIT: 30-10-04 - All works now. Update.

Oh man it was long.. Just a little update, i got an email from a LQ user asking about one thread i created regarding this matter.. and here's an update i replied to him. It should help anyone else who is getting problems setting up Nforce sound, video, and network drivers.

... It really turned out that i had 2 reasons why my computer kept freezing... ATI card and gay drivers... and my 250 gig sata hard drive was failing on me... It was too late when i noticed =/ and i lost everything..

But anyway, i got everything to work, except that the games have a slight delay between the audio, and the gameplay.. Nvidia claims that the latest nforce2 audio drivers that came out 3 days ago fixes that, but i haven't played a game to check yet. If anyone did, please tell me. Secondly, you can watch movies only and only on Totem player, and you can't skip through the movie or it will crash... (hey... better than nothing) EDIT: 30-10-04 Fixed. Read bottom of post.

im hoping you dont have ATI card, coz if you do, you're screwed.. they have the worst drivers, especially linux drivers... I spent days trying to get them to work.. Worked once, then i couldnt figure it out again.. What i did, is buy myself an nvidia geforce 6800 card, and it works perfectly. But there are a few things you should do first...

Firstly, keep hotplug installed, it installs essential drivers your motherboard needs. (like some which don't let your computer lag every 1 second)

but in the blacklist, make sure it includes
(/etc/hotplug/blacklist)

snd-pcm-oss
snd-mixer-oss
snd-intel8x0
snd-ac97-codec
gameport
snd-pcm
snd-timer
snd-page-alloc
snd-mpu401-uart
snd-rawmidi
snd-seq-device
snd-rawmidi
snd

fglrx
radeon
rivafb
forcedeth

fglrx, radeon, and rivafb only put there if you're on an nvidia card, and not an ati card, otherwise, omitt them.

keep forcedeth there, coz these are the linux default network drivers.. you're going to install nvidia's.

download the new nforce drivers and the latest nvidia video drivers (if you're using nvidia card) from their website.

Now reboot.. after you reboot, if you lsmod, you shouldn't see any alsa or oss drivers there.. good.. also, you shouldnt see forcedeth there, and you shouldnt have any network drivers installed.. this makes life easier...

chmod +x NFORCE-Linux-x86-1.0-0292-pkg1.run
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6111-pkg1.run

(if you have nvidia card, then)
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6111-pkg1.run
and install them. then read the documentation on what to edit in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
mainly as i remember, you have to set Driver to nvidia in
Section "Device"
Identifier "nvidiaCard"
Driver "nvidia"
#VideoRam 131072
# Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection

And go to /etc/modules.conf and delete everything there but these three lines. If you can't see any of them, then just manually add them:

alias sound-slot-0 nvsound
alias eth0 nvnet
alias char-major-195 nvidia

First one sets the sound, second sets the network, third sets the gfx card (if you have nvidia card.)

next... install audio drivers from
./NFORCE-Linux-x86-1.0-0292-pkg1.run
Don't install the network drivers yet, unselect it.

When you finish installing audio drivers, don't bother running alsaconf, it wont detect any drivers there.. But once you reboot, the nvsound drivers should be installed and running.

make sure your ethernet cable is plugged in the Gigabit slot (the top one afaik).
then run
./NFORCE-Linux-x86-1.0-0292-pkg1.run
unselect the audio, and install the network drivers. (ignore all the warnings)

once finished, reboot, and if everything goes smoothly, the nvnet drivers should load, and during boot time, you should get a warning saying that might taint the kernel (ignore that.. if you get the message, it meens all is well).

enter kde through startx, you should see the nvidia sign before loading kde. this meens your gfx drivers are up and running.

open a console terminal, and type
nvmixer
Speaker -> set to 5.1 surround sound.
and under xmms, Totem, or anything else, use the OSS drivers there.
Sound should work.

ping an ip address and you should get a response, (that is, if you fixed your network before, using netconfig). If you still don't get a ping response, connect your ethernet cable to the 100Mb slot (bottom), and try again. but on mine, it works on the top one.

And that's that.


NOTES:
I disabled OSS from my kernel.. i doubt you have to do that, but just incase you do, just go to

cd /usr/src/linux
make xconfig

go to Sound, and disable OSS sound modules from there (n)

And to recompile the kernel, follow DaOne's post on "Kernel compiling guide for newbies"

Keep in mind, everytime you recompile the kernel, you have to reinstall all your drivers again (sound, graphics, and network).

Once you get the hang of it, it will take you 5 minuts tops to reinstall them.

Hope this helps, and if you're using ATI drivers, they might be the main reason why your computer is freezing in kde. I think it was the DRI problem.. I can't help you there..

EDIT: 30-10-04
To get mplayer or gmplayer to play normally without sound errors, delay, or crashes, read http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...53#post1264753

Suse 9.2 hangs during loading "sata_sil" driver for SATA Silicon Image Controller.
So does the same Vidalinux
So does Yoper

The board has been pretty much flawless for me. The only issue I've had is with the SATA controller - I had no SATA drives installed but on boot the hardware detector would spend a lot of time (2 - 3 minutes) hunting for SATA drives. Disabling the controller in the bios fixed that issue.

I've used three different distros and the 2.4 and 2.6 series kernels on this board, I've never had a single problem with it.

It took a while to get the sensors working properly, but sound, networking, etc all worked straight out of the box, no downloading from NVIDIA necessary.

I have tried three different linuxeses on this box. Suse locks looking for log file. Redhat locks on IRQ 11. And I dont know why gentoo will not complete.

My searches have not turned up any results....

Onboard Sound + NVidia LAN using the NVidia drivers
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-0301


Onboard Nvidia LAN: driver nvnet (Nvidia binaries only)
Onboard Gigabyte LAN: sk98lin
Onboard sound : nvsound (Nvidia binaries only)

/etc/modules.conf must contain:

alias sound-slot-0 nvsound
alias eth0 nvnet
alias eth1 sk98lin

/etc/hotplug/blacklist must contain:

forcedeth
snd-pcm-oss
snd-mixer-oss
snd-intel8x0
snd-ac97-codec
gameport
snd-pcm
snd-timer
snd-page-alloc
snd-mpu401-uart
snd-rawmidi
snd-seq-device
snd-rawmidi
snd

You must set your audio apps to use OSS as stated in previous posts

Can't really say anything bad about this board. Been running it with an ATI 9600xt @ 75 bus and an XP 3000+/333 OC'd to an XP 3200+/400.

The only instability comes from the ATI driver (big surprise there)

Like DanZ23 I'm overclocked to 3200+ speeds and use an ATI radeon 9600xt as well.

I have the e-deluxe board, and their are bios updates that the user should get for memory compatibility.

Also disable front side bus spectrum in bios it defaults at 0.5 and causes frequent connect/disconnects with the onboard network cards in windows or linux.

Other than that it's a great motherboard and works superbly with any linux I threw at it.

The 2.6.17 kernel and up IMO are much better operator's on this for IDE performance. I don't use SATA so I cant comment on that.

The onboard nforce sound is good, however it's only AC97 codec and not real surround sound in linux. I achive surround sound by "duplicate front" in kmix in KDE. But in windows you get real surround sound go figure.

This board runs better in linux than it ever did in windows 2000 or windows xp.

Installed perfectly even updated the packages via the automatic update in the installer

everything works with ubunto and slackware :)