Monday, February 4, 2008

Linux on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L

I'm just putting this in my blog to help other people who search on this.

Most Debian-based installers don't work. They get hung up on the Grub install, and it throws a Grub error. Just continue and install Lilo instead and forget Grub, since it won't work until they fix something (spent 2 days on this!).

To do anything more, you have to build a new kernel. You can use 'defconfig', but the killer here is the fussy drivers for the sata drives. You need the 'experimental' piix drivers, and kill the standard piix. As well, you need to look in the gigabyte network drivers, and pick r8169.

The new kernel should work and you can install the Nvidia drivers from the Nvidia site. This gets everything working, but my son wants the spiffy 3-d compiz interface, which is proving to be a problem.

ps. Got compiz working! Man, is that a neat 3-d desktop, with rotating cubes, bouncy things, weird effects and everything!

13 comments:

Larry Clapp said...

Am planning on getting one of these, so I appreciate you posting this. Thanks!

Harold Asmis said...

It's proven to be a very hard working and fast machine for doing computations.

pHreaksYcle said...

My man, what type of linux is this? I am planning on using Ubuntu Hardy Heron with mine and am gonna be really pissed if this kinda thing happens. Thanks for the info.

pHreaksYcle said...

Sorry I just noticed you said debian based installers. Any info on heron would still be appreciated.

Harold Asmis said...

You must realize that Linux always does this with new hardware. This article may be dated now. I had the exact same problem with SATA drives, but then they eventually included it in the installer.

My guess is that the installation should now be clean, since this is a really great card!

pHreaksYcle said...

Thanks so much. My hope is restored. Keep up the good work.

Larry Clapp said...

Got my mobo. Debian netinst with grub worked out of the box (though I had to climb a bit of a learning curve to get RAID0 working :). Can't get sound working though. :( Any hints?

Harold Asmis said...

Sound was easy. Do an 'lspci' to get some info on the sound card. (I can't remember what I did!). You are going to have to go into the 'land of the new kernel', which isn't too bad, the Debian way.

When eventually you get into your kernel configuration, you'll see 'sound' and 'alsa'. You also have to turn off oss sound. That's where you drill in and make sure the right alsa driver is ticked!

Then again, maybe you have alsa, but you have to turn on the mixer! alsa has this strange thing about turning everything off at the start. I use kde, check the system info (for alsa), and check kmixer.

To get kde, use 'apt-get install kde kdm'

Larry Clapp said...

I've tried quite a lot, and alsaconf still refuses to recognize my card.

What kernel version are you using? What modules? What does your "lspci | grep -i audio" say?

Thanks for your help, I appreciate it!

Larry Clapp said...

Never mind. I installed kernel 2.6.25 and now my sound works. *sigh* I'm not sure that's the version I want to be running, though; I seem to recall some recent controversy on lkml about some giant leap backwards wrt scheduling in some of the later 2.6.x kernels. Anyway, thanks again!

Harold Asmis said...

Don't have it here, it's being used for research. lspci will give the type of device, then you'll have to use that when you put in a new kernel. Sorry, can't help you much further, but it does work!

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I also got this mobo and set it up yesterday (running Fedora Linux 9, kernel 2.6.25.14). It works great! The only problem is the sound - it keeps mum, I simply cannot hear any whisper at all from the rear jacks.

So my question is: how do you load the snd_hda_intel module, i.e. what module options do you use? Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Harold Asmis said...

Ah! So long ago, and I didn't check all the sound channels. I don't even know how Alsa handles these extra channels. Check your lspci to see the sound card, check dmesg to see the driver hooked on, and most likely the trouble is Alsa.