I've just finished building what I hope will become a nice mythbuntu box, if I can get it installed. I bought a Shuttle barebones PC, a SN78SH7.

The other hardware is as follows:

AMD Athlonx2 5400+
2gb DDR2 800MHz RAM
500GB 7200rpm Hitachi HD
A brown box DVDRW drive (not sure of brand, but seems to work ok anyway)
Abit Airpace PCI-E wireless card
Hauppauge Nova T-500 (the duality variant of the card, which is supported in mythbuntu 8.10)

The system has onbaord nVidia GeForce 8200. A more detailed rundown of the barebones system can be found here: http://www.shoeboxcomputers.com/prod...ducts_id=23884

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to install linux on the system yet - live CDs start to boot, then the screen goes blank and stays blank. The mythbuntu alternate CD (text based installer) will install the OS, but will hang at the same point on booting. The same thing happens with any flavour of linux I've tried so far. Booting into safe mode gives the following error message, hastily scribbled down over several failed boots.

ath-pci 000:03:00.0 PCI INT A GS1 16 LinkAE0A (level [the next bit is cut off the screen]w ) IRQ 16

It looks to my relatively inexperienced eyes like a problem with hardware detection. I've tried booting with acpi turned off, but no joy. This thing has even Knoppix stumped. I even installed WinXP just to check I hadn't put things together wrong and it works, but I would really like to get linux on my machine.

Any suggestions are appreciated!

If you have a BIOS setting to disable halt on memory errors you should select it and try to boot again with halt on memory errors turned off. All AM2+ socket motherboards I've used normally require 1066 mhz memory for the faster processors. I've also had problems with certain brands of memory. Turning off memory errors should allow you to boot if the problem is with halt on memory errors.

I have pretty close to the same system and have just started getting mine set up. I'm a long time Fedora user, so that's been my experience.

So far, I have failed to get the 64 bit version of Fedora to load, like you, it starts loading vmlinux and then hangs.

I have managed to get the 32 bit version of Fedora 10 to load via CD images, rather than a DVD image, and I needed to keep making multiple copies until I got one where all six disks passed the disk check.

The Shuttle FAQ doesn't give you much to go on. I'd post the link, but I'm still shiny enough that the system won't let me.

Good luck!

I just bought a very similar system.

Installed 4GB of mfg recommended memory, and AMD X2 5200 processor.
I havn't yet installed hard drive or DVD drive, but attempt to
boot have been unsuccessful.

I know I'm new to a system build, but would expect the POST to display, just to have a fightin-chance.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I've sent shuttle e-mail, but who knows when they will responde.

Many thanks on this holiday eve...

Michael

Hello... any news with the SN78SH7 & Linux?

I had in mind to buy an SN78SH7 with a configuration similar to the one described by Richey and install OPENSUSE 11.1 on it... but I'm not really an advanced Linux user, so maybe it's better to think about something else until the issue is clearly resolved...

Do someone know about a good Linux-friendly barebone PC?

Thank you, and good luck!

Dario

The "blank screen" problem is because the "nv" driver installed by Fedora (and most other distributions) when nVidia display hardware is detected does not work for 64 bit systems.

In order to install Fedora 10 on my laptop, I had to do the installation from the DVD in text mode. (I.e., press "escape" on the first screen and enter "linux text" to skip the GUI install.) If you install in text mode, your initab default will be level 3, so you'll boot to the command line. At that point you can edit /etc/fstab to use the vesa driver instead of the nv one. Then change /etc/initab so you'll boot to level 5 and reboot. You'll only have low resolution graphics until you enable the rpm-fusion repositories and install the nvidia driver from them. But once you've done all that, Fedora 10 is a nice distribution.

Note: I posted a bug report to Red Hat about this problem, with a suggestion the they add a "Use the VESA driver" option to anacondia which they may do for Fedora 11, but that won't be out for several months.

Update - have this fixed now. The problem was the wireless card. The ath_pci module caused the kernel to crash!

Fixed it by adapting these instructions to blacklist ath_pci, then using the ath5k driver instead. http://georgia.ubuntuforums.org/show....php?p=6026999

I also ended up doing a "yum install system-config-display" to be able to generate a xorg.conf file. I'm using the onboard nVidia display sent over the HDMI port to a Dell monitor. Without using the conf file, I wasn't getting the right resolution on the display.

I ought to submit a bug report to Fedora, but I haven't yet.

Not sure if you ever got an answer to this, but it works fine for me, I run Ubuntu on it as my main work machine. The only annoying thing is that there's some bugs in the coding for the usb ports: if you plug in a usb webcam it will freeze everything (in my repeated experience) and occasionally the usb keyboard or usb mouse will just freeze for no apparent reason (often under moderate system load). In earlier versions of (K)Ubuntu or on their live CDs sometimes you'd boot up only to find that the keyboard and/or mouse isn't working, even if you pull it out and plug it back in, or plug it in to a different port. This could be BIOS related, as there are some other issues with the current BIOS and how it processes the default hardware of the SN78SH7, but I think the keyboard and mouse freezing issues are particular to Linux.

Other than those minor annoyances though my Shuttlebox works like a charm!

Well after working more or less smoothly for several months major problems have arisen. Linux (specifically Kubuntu or Ubuntu, but I've also tried others such as Mint, Fedora and Mandriva) - either won't boot or will take forever to start up and then often as not will only recognize one of the three cpus. This came about gradually and for seemingly no reason. When I boot into XP everything is fine. I haven't updated the BIOS yet because this is my only working machine and I'm afraid of wrecking it. Has anyone updated their BIOS from a dual-boot scenario where grub2 controls the boot? I'm worried the dual-boot might cause an error in the Windows BIOS flashing process. I'm going to re-read this and other threads and see if anyone has some answers.

P.S. I think there are some serious issues with random freezes in various recent distros (F13, Mandriva, *Ubuntu). I've seen large threads about it so I don't think it's particular to any specific hardware.

Speaking generally, and with no specific knowledge of your system:

• The BIOS flashing is completely independent of your hard drive layout and boot loader.
• As part of the flash process, you will/should be given an option to create a "restore" flash image that will restore your BIOS to the pre-flash state.

I've flashed BIOS upgrades in several multi-boot systems with no problems.

(Note: Most BIOS update tools require that you use a Windows system. But, since you're dual-booting with Windows, that should be no problem. Some more user-friendly manufacturers offer a BIOS update as a ISO CD image or a USB stick image that you can burn and boot from even if you don't have a Windows system installed. Of course, when you boot from a CD, the "restore" option may not be available.)

Thanks for the tips, that puts my mind at ease. First I'm going to see if booting without the external usb hub plugged in might make a difference.

Turns out it was the USB hub! I unplugged it and it booted back into Linux speedy with all processors recognized! Sucks that this computer's hampered in its compatibility with Linux, but at least it's usable and I can say good-bye to Windoze again!