10.2 Alpha 4 Intel 965 Pci Express Almost Working?

So the kernel in 10.2a4 seems to have support for the new 965 chipset, but it still doesn't work right. Does anyone know if it supposed to for sure? Here is what is happening on mine:

First I tried installing with the current stable kernel version and of course none of my hardware was detected, and so on. So I read that support is spposed to be in the 2.6.18 kernel so I give it a try and it does seem to be supported, because my cpu and all of my usb devices are recognized. So on with the problem.

I tried with the 10.2a4 net install cd. It would get as far in the boot process as trying to init eth0 before it would drop out into manual mode. I looked at the system info at that time and saw my hardware was recognized correctly, and eth0 had sent and received some packets. It could not get through the dhcp part though. The router is fine, wide open on both ethernet and wireless, dhcp on and so forth. I fed it the ip address of my router to the install prompt and it would ask for a directory after that. If instead of my router's ip I told it a bogus ip, then it would come back right away with a network error, so it is obviously comunicating with the router in some fasion, just not well enough to get an ip address assigned.

I decided that I might have better luck figuring out what was going on if I installed the full version from disk so that I might work from an actual command line but that doesn't work out either: If I try to install from the cds it will stop shortly after loading the kernel saying that it cannot find the cd. I do have SATA drives on this beast, but I set the bios option to IDE instead of RAID already in case that was the problem. I guess it wasn't.

So anyway the point of this is 1) Does anyone know if this is a bug, or just as of yet unsupported hardware? 2) Do you have any ideas of what I should do?

By the way, the distros I have tried so far are this one with the 64 bit kernel, and fc5 with both 32 and 64 bit kernels: they both had cd problems similar to the one mentioned above (neither had the 2.6.18 kernel)
And the most interesting thing of all is an ubuntu cd which booted fine and installed. It does not have the right kernel to recognize my hardware though, so I don't seem to be able to do anything else with it. But isn't it weird that it doesn't have the cd problem that everything else seems to have? Maybe I can upgrade its kernel but still it is only the 32 bit version I think.

My pc: intel E6400 core 2 duo w/ 965 pci express, intel 7300LE, couple of sata drives and some memory.

thanks for taking the time to read this.

andrew

Which motherboard are you using? I'm contemplating putting together a similar system, but possibly with the G965, so any further info or progress updates would be really useful.

Thanks,

Tim.

Hey, check out this thread in the suse-factory mailing list.

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory...0/msg00202.html

Specifically, this post:

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory...0/msg00210.html

Basically something about changing jmicron to ahci in the bios and doing something else.

With the net install cd, did you feed it the right address? First it has to be the ip. So do a ping on (I'm using the kernel.org mirror of suse's factory repository since its blazing fast) mirrors.kernel.org from another computer. Load that ip and only just type the ip. Then for the directory it should be "/opensuse/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/".

But first try the fix for jmicron/ich8 so you can just use the install cd/dvd.

those mailing list thread seems specific to an add-on on controller for operating legacy ATA devices which is necessary because the P965 chipset does not natively support legacay PATA.

i do rather hope that 10.2 offers good support for the P965 chipset as i have just built a new system using it, along with a 6600 C2D cpu.
the above isn't really relevant to me as my system is pure SATA, even the DVDR drive. it is just bog standard P965 support i want and need to be able to run SUSE 10.2, i have a 20GB partition waiting for it.