Problem solved. In short the problem was the SiS 740 chip set used in the Amptron K7-810DLM4 mainboard. The solution was to add "pci=bios,biosirq" to the boot option in GRUB.
For anyone else who runs into this problem here is the info for the fix and where I found it:
Google: "sis AND 740 AND suse"
http://islay.dyndns.org/taz/
As you can see the most tricky part of the computer is probably the SiS 740 chipset. The two new elements of this chipset are first the integrated 3D-engine SiS315 and the dedicated hi-speed bus MuTIOL. Both of them may cause you some problems. I added a heatsink on the southbridge (SiS961). Most common 2.4 kernels do not initialize correctly the PCI bus (probably connected to the MuTIOL).
No PCI bus means no /proc/pci, and also no hardware on the PCI bus will work (USB, network, sound, etc.). I found that the latest experimental kernels (2.5.18 for ex.) are working and initialize the PCI bus correctly but they are not very stable. Thanks to Barchord from Viahardware who discovered that the kernel options:
pci=bios,biosirq
allows most kernels 2.4 to boot and initialize the PCI bus. So if you do not manage to install linux, or if the installation crashes, try this option, regardless to the distribution.
Added on 2002/07/03 : A small patch has been integrated to kernel 2.4.19-pre6 to make it compatible with the SiS740; nevertheless, with kernel 2.4.19-pre10-ac2, the boot options pci=bios,biosirq is still necessary.
XFree86 version 4.1 (and more recent) works on the SiS740 as on most other SiS chipsets due to the (great) work of Thomas Winischhofer Up to now (18/06/2002) the video works under X11 with 2D acceleration and Xv on the first CRT monitor. There is no 3D-acceleration because the DRI for the SiS315 is still lacking in the current kernel (2.4.18). As this computer has been designed for multimedia and home-cinema, Xv is more important than DRM/DRI. On my system (Thunderbird 900), reading a DivX in full screen (1280x1024) loads the system less that 40%.
Update from 03/07/2002 : To use a PCI graffic card, you need at least to upgrade (flash) your bios to the number 025. The bios can be found here FS40S025.zip. I tested with succes 2 old cards : a Matrox Millenium2 and a ATI Rage-pro. I used glxgears to test the 3D perfs : both obtained 128FPS wheras the integrated SiS315 (without any 3D acceleration) is at 200FPS. A SS50 with a P4 1.6GHz and a GeForce4-MX420 PCI, glxgears is at 1400FPS and 240FPS with the integrated SiS315 (thanks to Yann Klis)
There are several driver modules involved with DRI. Unfortunately, SiS changed the register settings on the 315 (compared with the 300 series) and they don't release any documentation. AFAIK, there is no development
going on at the moment as regards DRI on the 315. Well this is not really a good piece of news but if enough people are interested, maybe thing will change.
