Asus has a good reputation for the quality of its motherboards, and so when I needed a couple of small machines recently I didn't balk at acquiring two of their A7N266-VM boards. When coupled with an Athlon XP 1800+ processor and a 512 MB stick of DDR RAM, the result is a compact package with a lot of bang for the buck. Screwing the motherboard into an AOpen (Acer) mini-tower enclosure results in an attractive and highly functional package - the AOpen enclosures are very easy to work on, with nice features such as little levers which release the front blanking panels easily, and front panel audio and USB connectors.
However, I soon discovered that the A7N266-VM board has caused some problems for its purchasers when they try to install Linux on it.
You start with the usual hunt for drivers on the web. The A7N266-VM is based on an nVidia nForce chipset, which provides the audio capabilities, USB and network interfaces, together with a GeForce2 for graphics (the usual shared memory arrangement, but with 512 MB of RAM, that's not really a major drawback). Drvers for both are available at http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp - for the nForce, select "Platform / nForce Drivers", then "Unified Driver Package", then "Linux" and click the "Go!" button, which will - at the time of writing, take you to http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_nforce_1.0-0256 but don't be surprised if a new version has appeared by the time you read this.
For the graphics driver, select "Graphics Driver", "GeForce and TNT", then "Linux iA32" (or the appropriate platform), which will take you to http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_display_ia32_1.0-4363 but again, new versions are likely.
The nForce drivers are available in a number of different file formats - either as source tarball, or as both source and binary RPM's for specific operating system versions. In my case, I wanted to install the drivers on a machine which would be used as an Internet server and which, for security reasons, does not have any compiler or other development tools on it. So I had to specifically build a new binary RPM from the source RPM. This requires that you have the kernel source installed, and also that you have the appropriate configuration file (.config) in /usr/src/linux. In my case, I had to copy the /boot/config-2.4.18-27.7.x file off the target Red Hat 7.3 system to the development system and then rebuild the RPM file a few times before I eliminated some troublesome "unresolved symbol" errors.
Addendum (4/1/2004): I've noticed that when building the drivers from the source tarball, rather than rebuilding the SRPM, that the kernel source does not have to be configured. In other words, just install the kernel-source-2.4.xx-yy.z.i386.rpm, and then go straight ahead and build the nforce drivers, then run the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run script.
Addendum (29/11/2003): I had been using the nforce-1.0-256 drivers with the Red Hat 9 2.4.20-8 kernel, but when I upgraded to the 2.4.20-20.9 kernel, I found that the nvaudio driver would not compile correctly with the new kernel, giving errors such as "incompatible type for argument 4 of `remap_page_range_Rc414bdc2'". So I downloaded nforce-1.0-261.tar.gz and installed it - only to find that ssh sessions with other hosts were unusable due to long delays between processing characters, and Mozilla was unusable because the mouse pointer would not move while a web page was loading. So I reloaded the nforce-1.0-256 source and did a "make; make install" of just the nvnet directory. All is now well. There seem to be problems with 1.0-261, however, and when I get time I intend to investigate.
GRUB problems
The next problem that you might encounter is a failure of the system to boot after installation. I certainly had this problem after installing Red Hat 8.0 - the installation appeared to go smoothly and quickly, with no indication of any problems, yet after installation, the system failed to boot. The error message is:
Booting 'Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-14)'
root (hd0,1) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/ [Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1400, size=0x10ea0d]
Error 28 : Selected item cannot fit into memory
Press any key to continue . . . . .
The solution is to upgrade the version of GRUB installed on the system to version 0.93. The simplest approach, if you are using Red Hat 8.0 is to install the version supplied on the Red Hat 9 CD's, if you have them - simply boot from the RH 9 install CD 1 using the command
linux rescue
to boot in rescue mode. Once you have got to the bash command prompt, copy the RPM off the CD:
cp /mnt/source/RedHat/RPMS/grub-0.93-4.i386.rpm /mnt/sysimage
Now to install the RPM you will need to change your root directory to the one on the hard driver, so that the various RPM libs and database all appear in the correct places:
chroot /mnt/sysimage
I found that simply attempting to upgrade the grub RPM with rpm -Uvh did not work; in the end I uninstalled the previous RPM before installing the new one:
rpm -e grub-0.92 rpm -Uvh grub-0.93-4.i386.rpm
Assuming there are no error messages, you should now reinstall the GRUB boot loader with the command
/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda
(assuming you want the boot loader in the MBR of the hard drive, and not somewhere else). You can now shut down and reboot.
Of course, if you don't need to use Red Hat 8.0, a much simpler solution is to install Red Hat 9 in the first place. Unfortunately, some of us have to conform to standards for production systems that say we can't use the new software until it has been thoroughly checked out. Page last updated: 22/Dec/2004 Back to Home Copyright © 1987-2010 Les Bell and Associates Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. webmaster@lesbell.com.au