Scruff

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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!

yzrider210

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.

CloudBuilder

Nvidia drivers for lan port : www.nvidia.com

CloudBuilder

Nvidia drivers needed for lan : www.nvidia.com

MSKHez

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

Bozwayed

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!!!

krissly1

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.

urza

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?

Scruff

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.

oneferna

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

cyclocommuter

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

pupeno

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.

Jrmdidit

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

Redeye2

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

mhchavez99

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