[GLLUG] Re: Building a New System

[Marr]

On Thursday 24 July 2003 10:25pm, c.tower at express56.com wrote:
> 
> ...snip...
>
> In my recent experience, motherboards using nVidia's nForce (and probably
> nForce2) chips do not play well with Linux.

The nForce2 chipset isn't too bad, actually....

I bought a Shuttle SN41G2 (small form factor) rig 
(http://www.shuttle.com/new/product/barebone/specs_b.asp?B_id=11) a few 
months back. The Shuttle motherboard uses the nForce2 chipset. Most things 
seem to work fine, although this isn't my "24/7 machine", so it doesn't get a 
lot of runtime.

I've got it running Slackware 9.0. The video works great (it's actually got 2 
VGA plugs right on the mobo for native dual-head) but requires the nVidia 
(binary) driver. It supports TV-out too but I've not tried that yet. The 
basic audio works fine (using the standard i810 audio driver), although I 
haven't tested the advanced 5.1 surround sound (and probably won't for quite 
some time). The Ethernet works fine but also requires a binary driver, 
thereby "tainting" the kernel. The Firewire (IEEE-1394) was the biggest 
letdown for me. It doesn't work (at least with Slackware 9.0's 2.4.20 
kernel). I've read that nVidia claims that no custom driver is needed and 
that the basic Firewire drivers should work, but I've had no success. I 
suspect the Firewire will work in the near future; I just haven't bothered to 
try a newer kernel (especially 2.6-pre stuff) since it was easier to just 
slap my Firewire PCI card in it for now (to access an external Firewire hard 
disk drive). The temperature/voltage sensing works pretty well (e.g. using 
the 'lm_sensors' project to read the chip) but for some strange reason, it 
kicks the primary exhaust fan into high-speed mode (which is too loud for my 
tastes) every time I load a particular kernel module ('it87') needed by 
'lm_sensors' and I haven't found a way to kick the fan back into low-RPM mode 
(short of a reboot).

All-in-all, I'm pretty happy with the nForce2 chipset. I could live with the 
binary video driver, but it bugs me a bit that the Ethernet driver is binary 
too. Come on, nVidia -- how proprietary could a simple 10/100baseT chipset 
really be? On the plus side, the nVidia video/Ethernet drivers are 
dirt-simple to compile/install and the video driver's options are very well 
documented in an attached README file.

FWIW....

Bill Marr