As my single core Athlon rig with it's heady 1 GB of ram is getting a bit long in the tooth I'm going to be building a new PC; it will be running Slackware 14 obviously. As it's going to spend most of it's life encoding audio and editing photos I particular fancy the Sandybridge/Ivybridge I5s/I7's. The thing is Slackware 14 is a bit behind the recommended graphics stack on some packages (although not far behind it has to be said).

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/2012.07.html

The main gap is with the intel driver and libdrm.

Is anyone running one of these processors on current at the moment-it would be good to hear how it's going?

you can always build them using the SlackBuild on -Current

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I had tremendous problems on an ASUS P8Z68-V LE board with an i5-2400 until the 3808 (May 2012) BIOS version was released for the board. After installing the new BIOS the kernel booting and graphics problems went away whether running -current or 13.37.

A few months ago I had troubles (using an older faulty BIOS at the time) with Slack64-current but X.org updates to -current around May or June resolved the video problems I was experiencing with -current.

I chose the ASUS board to use the integrated graphics to connect two digital monitors (DVI-D & HDMI) to keep the screen colors of the two monitors close to each other without needing a separate video card. I wanted to escape the mismatched colors mixing VGA and digital signals to dual monitors that I experienced with the older system. The 3D acceleration of the Sandy Bridge Intel HD graphics works for me but I'm not running video games.

I too am upgrading from a single core processor so coupling this 4 core 3.1 GHZ processor with SSD and 16GB of RAM (VirtualBox is also running) is refreshingly fast for me.

Others have expressed problems with Intel graphics in the past and switched to AMD/ATI or NVIDIA. On a desktop system with the Intel integrated graphics of the i5 or i7 you can always later choose to add a separate video card if the Intel graphics is not working out.

If this is for a laptop you may want to investigate the CPU power usage before deciding on the Ivy Bridge processor.

Gamers may have had a different experience than I with Slack(64) -current and Intel graphics.

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I have been building libdrm, mesa, and the xorg driver for nouveau myself on 13.37. You can do the same for intel drivers on 14.0.

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If you need newer xserver, it is a good idea to follow the current branch, because it will be a pain to build all the packages for 13.37.

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I have another thread or two on the problem, but you may want to consider the BIOS of the mb you buy. I ended up with a i7 (3770k) and a Gigabyte Z77 D3H, which has the UEFI bios. I have been working on it on and off for two months, and have no makaged to install Slackware so that it boots and runs as it should. The issues are: installation and booting, building and installing a kernel which will boot and run and show graphics properly, and getting it all up on a standalone machine. It's easier on a VM, but I'm trying to get the hardware to work. I've even considered getting an old motherboard with the old BIOS on it, but cannot find one after several calls to several mb manufacturers.

For example, there are varying levels of "backwards compatibility" which may allow you to boot off a USB stick or a CD/DVD, but that style of booting appears to be gone with UEFI. Besides if what you are booting doesn't have UEFI frame buffer support, you may not see anything after you boot.

I can't believe that I am the only dummy trying to lick this problem, and perhaps there are somethings I should know and understand better, but as more people buy new motherboards, this will become a greater issue.

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some excellent background knowledge of EFI/UEFI

http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/

Perhaps it will be of some help

john

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Asrock Z77 pro3 MoBo
Intel i5-3550 Ivybridge

Working fine on 13.37 and 14.0beta, at least I haven't seen any problems yet.

samac

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I think that i'll try this.

I bought an intel i3 2120t recently. It gave me problems in 13.37 but seems to work just fine in -current. I didn't have to do anything to the stock -current install to get it working..

That's good to know. Phoronix are reporting that ivybridge on z77 is working fine on a 3:2 and latest stable xorg/mesa, which means slackware 14 should be good to go. One thing that I don't quite understand is the impact of efi. My understanding is that secure boot can switched off but that lilo can't boot from efi, which most modern mbs seem to have. Are you using lilo on your asrock board?

My laptop is Ivy Bridge, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3720QM with Intel HD 4000 Graphics. No problems with recent versions of -current (I am running a 3.4.x kernel). I do moderate gaming. SuperTuxKart and Oolite run fine in fullscreen (1920x1080).

See http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...de-4175413076/ for more info on my situation.

Yes. Apparently there is some option in the bios that enables uefi but it is disabled so lilo works just fine.

samac

samac, how did you install, and how do you boot (grub2, elilo?)?

Thanks.

Samac, no need to respond...I recalled that you had made an earlier post in answer to one of my questions, and had your configuration there. It looks like you are using lilo, with your mb backward compatibility mode. Thanks.