Linux stability an compatibility with NForce2 MB-s
 

Hi,
Before I buy my new computer, I would like to hear your experience with MSI K7N2, or any other NForce2 based board. Is it stable, does sound and nic work ok, does drivers work with 2.6.x kernel ...
(Planning to have NVidia graphic card too, so I suppose there would be no problems)
In your opinion, is it better to have KT400 board or NForce2 on a Linux box?
Distro will be Slackware 9.1.

Thanks,
Milosh

I have an Nforce2 motherboard and their are drivers available for both the nic and onboard sound that work great. Their are some issues with acpi and lapic which cause random system lockups on Nforce2 motherboards. This can easily be fixed by disabling things with the boot time parameters.

I've never used a KT400 motherboard so I can't give you a good comparison.

I have that very board running on Mandrake 10.0. I do have a problem with the sound which I have not yet sorted out but the rest of it is fine. Everything else is working fine. If I get the sound working I'll be extremely happy although I have a spare sound card if that doesn't work.

Iain

HOW ON EARTH DID YOU GET LINUX TO WORK ON THE K7N2 DELTA-L??? AAGHT I'm going bonkers... it can't seem to access my HDD partitions (2 of them, 10 and 70 gb) or something like that and the installation hangs... HELP!!!!

nforce2 & 2.6.6
 

A kernel developer my the name of Andrew Morton is being inconsiderate and intensionally breaking support for all Nvidia hardware. 2.6.6 makes nforce2 systems crash randomly, sound is poor and the Geforce driver no longer works. If this is not soon fixed i am soon starting a anti Andrew Morton fan club. Linux is about freedom. Breaking support for a popular chip set is taking freedom away.

I find it hard to believe mr Morton is breaking support for Nvidia hardware intentionally. I have an NF7-Sr2 which works wonderfully using kernel 2.6.5, but I haven't tried 2.6.6 yet (bootsplash doesn't play nice with the other patches I use). If you have any evidence (for lack of better words) of Morton's anti-Nvidia campaign I'd love to see it.

Anyway, in my opinion nforce2-based boards work very well now but perhaps not with the distributions currently out there - you'll want to run a very recent kernel (although perhaps not 2.6.6 if enyawix is correct). Sounds works very well using Alsa (I'm using the external snd-intel8x0 driver, not the in-kernel one) and the onboard Ethernet works well (forcedeth module). SATA works very well too, both with the "regular" EIDE/ATA driver as well as with libata.


Håkan