Hi,
I must apologise if this has been covered but I couldn't find it when I needed it.
This is to help anyone who like me didn't know what to do but hopefully this may save others time.
I have a Shuttle SN95G5 which like many motherboards has a Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet controller on board.
When I first installed linux I was getting problems with video jerking periodically, say every second or so. I originally thought this could have been my graphics card and drivers and being an nvidia got their driver and installed. I thought I had followed their instructions but I missed a step and this caused further problems more on that in a moment.
Part of the install process for the nvidia driver requires runlevel 3 (command prompt for noobs) and when I booted into runlevel 3 I got a recurring error message relating to the network device.
Code:
Class: internel Software error.
Nr: 0x19e
Msg: VPD: Cannot read VPD keys.
This repeated every second or so and caused the command line to be very difficult to use. You could still type but not see what you were typing.
To stop this message initially all I could do was to stop the network from starting up.
Note that this problem doesn't affect terminal windows in runlevel 5.
Not fancying the idea of having to use my only PCI slot for a new network card I spent much time searching and rooting around forums I finally stumbled on a solution.
Unfortunately I cannot find the original post I used so I can't credit the relevant people for this.
BE WARNED
This worked for me but might not for you so don't blame me if it messes up your hardware. Also I think this may only work for Marvell Yukon boards
Ok so the wonderful people at ASUS released a patch for this problem on their motherboard, the KV8 i think. This guy in his post said that he used this patch on his shuttle and it worked so I think the patch is specifically for the marvell device and is motherboard independent.
I was getting annoyed with my jerky video and was sure that the frequency of the jerk and the frequency of the message were no coincidence, so I tried it and it worked for me too.
What you need is a DOS boot disk and the files extracted from the archive you can get
here
follow the instructions in the readme and hey presto no more messages.
Incidentally I was right the messages were causing the jerking (and also huge log files).
Secondly the video was still slightly jerky, the reason?
I forgot to remove 1 line from xorg.conf namely
Load "dri"
in the module section
So this was being used instead of the accelerated nvidia driver.
Moral?
Read readme files properly
Finally sorry if this story is a little long winded but I hope it helps you as much as that patch helped me. It made mythtv (the reason I got the shuttle amongst others) a viable option. So thanks to the nameless saviour who's post I can't find.
Good luck
Fraser