I had a report of someone successfully installing Suse on it, but I don't know if it was 8.1 or 8.2... I'll poke a bit.

Oops! Sorry, you are right. I only looked at the audio
and nic files, and they are source tarballs, but the one
for Promise 20378 is only modules, for kernel 2.4.19 or
lower.
.
Where do you see Linux drivers on the Promise website?
I can't find them.
.
Both Asus and Promise are located near to me. On Monday
I'll try calling them up to see what they have for Linux
support. Since Promise is making disk I/O chips and
cards, and Linux is widely used on servers with a lot of
disk, maybe they can be motivated to release the driver
source, or at least keep it more up to date for the
latest kernel.
.
Regarding the AGP problem, is your Radeon card the newer
low voltage (.8 or 1.5 volt) type? The older ones
(3 volt?) won't work.
.
What happens when you try to compile the Radeon driver
for kernel 2.5? Maybe you can fix it. Or since they are
providing source, and thus are favorable to Linux, maybe
they will fix it if asked.
.
The linux-kernel mailing list FAQ http://www.tux.org/lkml/
says the list is gated to this newsgroup: fa.linux.kernel
which can be read via google:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...kernel&num=100
.
Using google advanced search, and looking for "i875" or
"intel875" (which doesn't find anything) or "875", in this
newsgroup, there is almost no mention of the i875 chipset
in the kernel mailing list.
.
Most references to i845 mention AGP. Is AGP the only thing
the kernel has to deal with in the i845 or i875 chipset?
.
If not, it seems dangerous to run Linux on a motherboard
that has a master chip set (i875) that the kernel is not
designed to deal with.
.
Maybe this discussion should also be posted to Usenet,
e.g., comp.os.linux.misc and comp.os.linux.hardware.
A lot more people would see it there.
.
Mark Bilk mark@cosmicpenguin.com

Aww, I thought you found something good. :-(

As far as I can tell, it's three things with the i875 that the kernel has to deal with, 1) AGP, 2) ATA controller and 3) S-ATA controller.

The (P)ATA controller is so standard that the generic support works well. The S-ATA has had issues, I don't know how resolved those are, but appearantly at least some got it running with Suse.
The AGP shouldn't be an issue, but it is. I've failed researching more, I was kind of discouraged when none of the number of people I tried to query about it (Asus, and three Linux developers) answered.

Linux drivers can be found on Promise' website under "download", if there is Linux drivers for that card. They only support their own card; they don't provide drivers for "built-in" chips in other products. Appearantly the driver for S150 TX2plus could work (same chip?), but that driver seems to be binary-module-only too.

Oh, and the Hercules 3d prophet 9700 pro is a 0.8 volt 8x AGP card. It seems to work well under Windows on the same machine, and it works skipping the agp driver under Linux, using the VESA driver (800x600 yay).

Hi,

i have just tested the P4C800 asus motherboard with a western digital raptor 36Go Sata.
mandrake find the hd when i configure the ide in the bios :
main / config IDE
onboard ide operate mode / compatible

then the second ide is the sata ide

pascal

Does anyone got any graphics card to run on this box, with a non-generic driver? nVidia Geforce or any Radeon?

Hello,

Last week I also installed a new system with a P4C800 Deluxe motherboard. Have an Asus 9280/TD Videocard (NVidia Geforce4 4200), 2.6 GHz proc with 800MHz FSB, 1GB PC3200 memory (2 x 512MB).

The whole system functions like you would expect for an Asus system. Some problems though:

- The NIC driver has to be installed seperatly but is available on the download site of asus. This is a opensource driver, therefor just compile and it works.

- The Videodriver is available from NVidia. This is a default driver for allmost all chipsets of NVidia and it works like charm. This one also has it's own AGP driver that can be used instead of AGPART.

- There are no drivers available at the moment for the Promise 20378 RAID controller. There are some binary drivers but none for the latest kernels and latest distributions.

- The sound driver is available from the alsa-site (http://www.alsa-project.org/) Version 0.9.4 works for me, just have some problems here with sound volume etc but have the idea that they have to do with the kind of speakers I use. Don't have a 6.1 set at the moment so I just use 2 simple speakers from an older PC.

I hope I have been of some assistence, and would really like to hear it if someone has found a sollution for the Promise 20378 controller.

Greetings,
Jan Hugo Prins

Some updates to my post regarding drivers for this beast:

- The Promise Serial ATA Driver is available at the following website:
http://www.antgel.co.uk/compsci/linu...ise_raid.shtml

Some info from the readme:
/*********************************************************************
* PROMISE FastTrak TX4000/376/378/S150 TX Series Linux Driver README
*
* PROMISE Linux support team <support@promise.com.tw> 2003/02/20
*********************************************************************/
I have installed this driver and it seems to load ok. Can't test anything more at the moment because I don't have anything connected to this controller yet.

- The sound is working flawlesly after installing some alsa-mixer tools etc and changing some mixer settings.

- There is a new driver for the Ethernet controller (version 044) at the asus website. Installed it and don't have any problems with it till now.

Good Luck.
Jan Hugo

Hmm, the link doesn't work?

An update from me: I put a nVidia FX 5200 in the machine, and it works excellent. The issue seems to be only with Radeon, maybe only 9700.

Sorry, now it works.

JH

Thanks. Downloaded and compiled. But:

Jul 8 15:35:05 orchid kernel: PROMISE FastTrak TX4000/376/378/S150 TX Series Linux Driver Version 1.00.0.15
Jul 8 15:35:05 orchid kernel: ft3xx: Insufficient System Memory !!
Jul 8 15:35:05 orchid kernel: ft3xx: ft3xx Driver Module removed !!
Jul 8 15:35:05 orchid kernel: ft3xx: No valid controller detected

How much memory do I need? I have 2Gb in the machine plus 1Gb swap...

# cat /proc/meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 1988734976 1982849024 5885952 0 81911808 1451278336
Swap: 1077501952 172691456 904810496

My system has 1GB of memory and didn't have any problems. Default up2date redhat 9 system. And we have the same mainboard as far as I know (P4C800 DeLuxe).

Could it be that this .o file that is in the archive is not compiled for a bigmem system? Don't know what the implications are there with systems with that much memory. Or, is 2GB not BigMEM? Was BigMem above 4GB?? Don't know.

Is the controller enabled in your bios? You can disable the controller.

I don't run HighMem, but I run a 2Gb process size/2Gb user adressable patch in the kernel.

I ran some debug. It seems it fails here:

FT_VIR = (unchar *) __get_free_pages(GFP_ATOMIC,PowerOfVIR); // 2MB
FT_PHY = (unchar *) __get_free_pages(GFP_ATOMIC,PowerOfPHY); // 512KB

both those gets NULL back. I have no idea what __get_free_pages does... It's not defined in the source. It's possibly some part of the kernel, hopefully not from ftlib.o.

I'll reboot later (I have a week uptime) and see if it gets any better.

Then I'm afraid is has something to do with this patch that it doesn't work the way it is supposed to work. Could you try what happens if you remove this patch?

Jan Hugo