This contribution is just a rant, which I needed to get off my chest.

I will put my question in the next box...

Recently I upgraded to Mandrake 9.1 from 9.0. No problems except with Shorewall. Even my incompatible scanner was recognised and worked sort of, after a fashion. Brilliant. Okay not the world's greatest motherboard (PC Chips LMR with SiS graphics and sound) and I was using a USB cable internet connection rather than Ether but even there, Mandy 9.1 did not seem to drop my connection any more. I was so content. But disaster was to follow...

On 5th April my computer decided to conk out and would not come back on. Possibly I panicked, but as the next day was a Sunday I went to the only place to go, a computer fair and bought what seemed like some OK kit, an ASUS motherboard with on board nVidia GeForce2 graphics, sound and ethernet. Athlon XP2200, 512 DDR RAM and a Tsunami Capricorn case, complete with 350w power.

I put it together, and used the Hard and Optical Drives from my old box, switched it on and started loading Windows. Then more disaster... the computer reset... and again... I phoned the number on the receipt from the computer fair, and after a brief technical discussion we decided that either the memory chips were dodgy, or the Power Supply was faulty. As a result I pulled said items out of the box, parcelled them up, sent them off, and on Monday 14th came home from work to find there was a parcel at my local TNT depot. The firm had send me replacement memory chips and a nice Branded 400w power supply, I plugged it in and it all worked. Problem Solved? Was it hell!

By Wednesday I had got Windows more or less up and running and attempted to reconnect my internet cable connection. As I would be dual-booting Linux I decided to use Ethernet. Plug and Play? Plug and Pray, more like, it took me four attempts to get the ether drivers going, even right-clicking on the *.inf file on the disk did not work! Then I had to install NTL Broadband using ether. It does not work. After a long struggle I phoned customer services at NTL and the nice lady there walked me through the set up, none of which involved their poxy setup disk!! At last!! Now I can load Linux!! I got today off work, and, remembering how easy it was to install Mandy9.1 thought today a couple of hours and I could play LBreakout all afternoon, Wrong.

Sorry people, I had to get that off my chest. I will put the problem and the actual question in the next box...

My motherboard is an ASUS A7N266WM with ACPI bios rev 1004.

I loaded Mandrake 9.1, and hit my first problem during the load itself: it could not find a driver for my ethernet card so could not set up my internet connection. Now why didn't I just leave it on USB? Never mind, I could go into windows and check things out on the internet.

When I ran Linux, the video display had these little horizontal bits of distortion around vertical edges, which got worse when the computer was doing something. It looks horrid and occasionally makes small text unreadable. Back into Windows, I tried the ASUS web site, not very helpful. I tried the nVidia site. I downloaded a number of upgrade files.

The video driver file claims to work with Mandrake 9.1, with all nVidia cards. Not with mine it doesn't!

My display adaptor is called:
nVidia GeForce2 Integrated GPU

The driver file is called:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run

I followed the upgrade to the letter, and no errors were reported, finally editing the XF86Config-4 file to change the driver to "nvidia" rather than "nv". Restarted, and, no X. I had to edit the driver back to "nv" to get a graphic display, which crashes whenever I try to run LBreakout2!

I also tried the upgrade for the nVidia Chipset. This is supposed to sort out the Network Driver and the Sound.

The Network Adapter is called:
NVIDIA nForce MCP Networking Adapter

The Sound Adapter is called:
NVIDIA(r) nForce(TM) MCP Audio Processing Unit (Dolby(r) Digital)

I downloaded the following RPMs from nVidia:
NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0256.mdk90up_2.4.19_16.athlon.rpm
NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0248.src.rpm

The first of these is meant for Mandy9.0 and the latter is meant to be run with rpm --rebuild to create an RPM for any build. Needless to say it does not, it just gives several screenfuls of errors and builds nothing on my setup. The first one does not set up the network on Mandy9.1, will not uninstall with "rpm -e", and once loaded the sound system keeps crashing with an error message alleging CPU overload, even when no sound is playing!

So... does anyone have any past knowledge of this mobo? Or any ideas which will re-instate my recent happy relationship with Mandy?

It has been my experience that compiling Nvidia drivers works better than loading rpms.

Also, don't us a .run file to load the driver for your graphics card.

Get the lates GLX and kernel tar.gz files, install the kernel first, then the GLX, then edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

As for your nic and sound card, I can only suggest the google search as I've no experience with them.

Good luck-

Thanks for your reply. Since my earlier post I reformatted my Linux Partition and re-installed Mandrake 9.1. The difference was that I had kept "/home" on a seperate partition to keep my data files, this time I did not mount this partition, so it was a 100% clean install. For whatever reason, the ".run" file now worked perfectly. Though I still have the same problem that LBreakout2 won't go full screen correctly!

I have tried to load the src.rpm to patch for the Network card, but I get a message that one should not tamper with the Kernel like that one should tamper with it a different way! Well I don't have a clue! I tried the Mandrake 9.0 rpm (there isn't one for 9.1) and it seems to have no effect. My sound still works OK in stereo, it's not connected for surround nor is it ever likely to be.

My remaining problem is that I can't get the network card to go. Having just got NTL on the phone to get my Windows Internet connection going via ethernet instead of USB, I can see me having to get it back via USB because I know how to get Mandrake to connect that way (just pick CDCether). I would rather not.

So here is my question - does anyone know how to get "nvnet" driver to connect Mandrake 9.1 to Internet?

Ok I had an MSI K7N420 (nforce 1) that no matter what i did absolutly refused to start x. Turns out that because of the way the Nforce chipset is implemented , i could have searched for 100 yrs and not been able to fix it.

so my sugestion is to disable the onboard nic and use a differant card then the integrated one.

i figured out that in my situation because of the integrated video on my board , even if I ran a agp or pci graphics card and disabled the integrated one , it still confused linux due to problems with the nforce chipset, and would not start x.

i'm thinking you are haveing a simalar issue.

i have it up and running great on a gigabyte tech GA-7VAX with the exeption of a sound issue im haveing. good luck!

Epilogue:

The network driver did not run because Mandrake 9.1 does not, by default, install the kernel-source which the network/audio patch from nVidia needs to work. Once I sussed that and loaded it, the tar.gz file loaded perfectly and everything is now running perfectly.

It is not in the instructions from nVidia, but I got pointed the right way on their linux forum. I have e-mailed them about the gap in their instructions.

LBreakout2 and all the problems I had with the visuals have now vanished, too. I just had to edit XF86Config-4 to allow a higher HSync rate.

Problem is that if I did not have Windows I would never have figured the problem out, as it was only by checking the running monitor info whilst in Win98 that I could see what the correct figures were!

davecs,

Hello, I got problem to identify the eth0 nic lan card in nvnet,
can you tell the steps for fix ?

Matthew

Hi Matthew

As you are on this site I assume you have another way of connecting to the Internet.

Which Linux are you using? And is the lan card part of your motherboard with an nVidia chipset?

I have Mandrake 9.1 and an Asus A7N266VM motherboard. I downloaded the latest nVidia driver from the net at the time this was:

NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0256.tar.gz

There is a later release (0261 instead of 0256) now.

If you unzip it, there is a read-me file which tells you almost everything you need to know. However, it forgets to tell you that you need to have installed "kernel-source-version-number". This is on Mandrake 9.1 disk 3. If you don't have disk 3 you need to download the rpm from Mandrake. Once you install it, the installation procedure supplied with the tar.gz files work.

With the latest release of the nVidia driver, there is an *.rpm file for the Mandrake 9.1. I would imagine that, provided you have the standard 9.1 kernel, you can load this without the kernel source.

The place to go is:

www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_nforce_1.0-0261

Here you can download the rpm and or the tar.gz file. There are builds for distros other than Mandrake. If you use the tar.gz you will need to load the kernel-source for whatever version you are using.

This should get your nvnet working.

There is definitely a way to retreive monitor sync values through plug and play in linux, I know this because some distributions do it. Can someone tell us how?

Hi,
I confirmed .rpm not work (for me) and tar is ok:

Please d/l and install from the tar ball from:
NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0261.tar

Install steps
---------------
tar -xvzf NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0261.tar
cd nforce
make
make install

That is it. Thanks!