skunkcabbage

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Hi All,

I'm trying to set up a AMD64 X2 machine, and have gone for SuSE 10.

Has anyone had any success with this installation. In particular, are there any problems with nforce4 motherboards? If you look on the nvidia website and for the known issues with their latest nforce linux driver, it would seem that MP machines/SMP kernels have "some issues".

I'd just like to know what mileage (if any) people have got with these systems.

Cheers,

Jon.

AMD 64 X2 4400+ (1MB cache)
Gigabyte K8N-Ultra9 motherboard
1GB PC3200 (dual channel)
300GB SATA disk
GeForce 6200 Turbobache PCI-E graphics

Elfod

I'm running suse 10.0 eval on an asus a8n-sli mobo, with an athlon 64x2 4400 and so far it's sweet.

It even flawlessly installed the nvidia drivers and automagically detected my 7800GTX card! I have two running in SLI, don't know if SLI is enabled, but 3d def is.

I also had 9.3 running well to, though had to manually install the vid drivers, not that that was hard mind.

Let us know how you get on.

skunkcabbage

Hi Elfod,

Thanks for the info - I've made some progress, and am currently testing my installation.
I think Nvidia should update their webpage to include a list of nforce/CPU combinations known to work with Linux - it would make a huge difference to people's purchasing choices.

One thing I've noticed that seemed to make a difference was installing the NForce driver from nvidia. Before I did this I disabled the Marvell chipset (LAN1) on the Gigabyte K8N-Ultra9 mobo (which has 2 NICs). Confusingly, one is called on chip LAN (LAN2 - provided by the Nvidia chipset), the other is called on-board LAN (LAN1 - the Marvell chipset). I read somewhere that someone had some joy with disabling this extra LAN and since I don't intend to use this machine as a firewall it wasn't such a hardship to do without it.

Then I installed the Nforce driver - and used Yast to specify that the NIC use the nvnet kernel module.

Since then I think the machine has become more responsive, Gnome starts faster, things seem to work "better" - can't really put my finger on it, but certainly better than with the forcedeth module installed by default during the install.

I think the jury is out on whether it's better to use the OSS Nvidia supplied driver or let SuSE use the Intel 8x0 alsa compatible driver - I'll probably try both and report back.

Best wishes,

Jon.

TigerLinux

I envy you to have such a "state-of-the-art" machine, i am just running a Pentium Celeron 2.4GHz CPU, AtiRadeon 9200SE 128MB AGP card, sound is built-in on the ACORP "cheap" motherboard.

Elfod

Well, I had to save long and hard for this machine. I went for future proofing bits - good mobo, CPU and PSU, and after a lot of consideration went for the two 7800GTX cards. They's started to drop in price recently with the newer non-reference designs coming out and I managed to haggle a deal to get the two together.

Originally I was planning to get just one and add another later, but a couple of different sources pointed pointed out that the vid cards evolve rapidly and designs go obsolete (especially with new non-ref designs coming out) and coupled with the fact that at present SLI only works if the two vid cards are absolutley identical.

Other stuff like cheap RAM, using onboard audio, cheap HDs will all be upgraded later when my wallet is released from hospital

SkunkCabbage: one thing I have noticed screwed is the surround sound. I have a cheap speaker setup (logitech x-50) and under windows (dual boot) the surround setuo works fine, under suse 10 the LFE and rear surround is mixed up. If I incorrectly swap the cables it's works great, however it's not right.

I've had a poke around in the GUI sound config, but nothing useful, so I'll start poking around in config files next.

net - I have the same nics on my asus mobo, both work fine for me under 10 and 9.3.

vid - previously under 9.3 I had to manually install the vid driver, this time I just used the fetchnvidia.sh script, which worked like a charm under 10, but always failed under 9.3. Wil have to have a poke around X too and see if SLI is actually enabled. Doubtful, but curious.

skunkcabbage

try the nvidia-config utility that comes with the nvidia driver - it may have a section on SLI. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to have this running in Linux, since AFAIK it's mostly hardware driven.

Best wishes,

Jon.

Pete M

According to the Nvidia forums 1.0-8xxx series drivers are due out this month and will have SLI support

The current drivers do not support SLI

So it looks like we will all just have to be patient

Pete

Elfod

Ah, cool to hear, thanks for that.

Just got VMWare Workstation 5 working too under 64 bit, that took some working out. Had to use a patch from ftp://platan.vc.cvut.cz/pub/vmware/ (vmware-any-any-update94.tar.gz). Just extract it and run "./runme.pl" as root and it compiles again as normal.

So that leaves me with just surround sound to fix now - finally managed to find a 64 bit rpm for libdvdcss earlier so media is all sorted now too. The only thing I need windows for now is games, maybe I should have a look at the Transgaming thang...

In building this new machine one funny thing has struck me: even with all the free dvd players I got with the mobo etc. (mostly providing the cyberlink one), to get dvd playback with surround sound on Windows requires an upgrade of something in the region of £30. With linux, free! (when I get this final issue worked out that is)

SC: Is it worth putting all of this together into some sort of HowTo/FAQ since nforce/suse/64bit is slightly odd?

Elfod

OK, everything is working great, including surround sound (woohoo!) except this one last bit in the install guide (from http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/n...easeNotes.html) which I can't work out after much searching and experimenting.

As I said, nvsound is working, but after booting I must manually load the driver using "modprobe nvsound".

From the instructions:

Except I have no idea where the hell the kernal config file is. From my searching it seems to vary by distro, and I have found two possibilities, /boot/config-2.6.13-15-smp or /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15-obj/x86_64/smp/.config, both of which have big warnings about not editing them manualy since they are autogenerated.

Can somebody please point me in the right direction please?

On another note for fellow suse 10.0/nforce4 users, I selected threaded OSS (since nvsound is an OSS driver) in KDE control panel and to get dolby surround in xine set speaker arrangement to "Surround 5.1" and device used for 5.1 to "plug:nvsound". Interestingly, DTS seems to work too

Pete M

Elfod

You should have a "/etc/init.d/boot.local" file

Just add modprobe nvsound to it and it should load on boot

Pete

Keruskerfuerst

Hello!

The kernel config file is placed in /boot/

To change the config file, you should use /usr/src/linux make menuconfig or make xconfig.

Greetings

Elfod

Thanks both for the guidance.

Pete M - your solution worked great, thanks.

Kersuker... - thanks for the tip, had a wander through the config tools, but have no idea what the hell I'm doing, can't find any trace in there of nforce or even how to add a custom entry. However, it is progress so thanks, will keep digging now that I have a new direction to explore


Also, I have discovered now that ordinary sound is a bit weird, like realplayer, mp2s are garbled or silent. I presume this because the config isn't entirely finished and I have some sort of wierd ALSA/nforce conflict going on...

If I work out the solution I'll post it here. Cheers for the tips both.

Elfod