I am planning of replacing XP with 11.1 on my desktop PC which uses an Asus M3N78 motherboard. The board model is not listed in the HCL and neitherr are the individual components.
Summary of specs are:
AMD® AM2+ Quad-Core CPU/AM2 CPU Support
AMD 140W CPU Support
NVIDIA GeForce 8200 Chipset
Hybrid SLI Support
HyperTransport 3.0 and PCIe 2.0 Ready
HDMI/Full HD Support
Smooth Blu-ray / HD DVDPlayback
Multi Displays Support
Support 45nm Phenom™ II CPU
Audio VT1708B 8 -Channel High Definition Audio CODEC
I got the impression that the nVidia chipset can cause real problems and lacks good drivers… Is this a fair assessment?
This board also has onboard RAID which you enable in the bios and then require special drivers during the OS install which allows the install routine to access and set up the RAID array. In XP I had to slipstream the drivers into the installation. Will openSuSE support the onboard RAID and would it automatically find and pick it up during install?
Has anyone here used this MB with openSuSE? This board is only 4 months old so don’t really fancy having to bin it and get something new.
suse tpx60s wrote:
> I got the impression that the nVidia chipset can cause real problems
> and lacks good drivers… Is this a fair assessment?
>
> This board also has onboard RAID which you enable in the bios and then
> require special drivers during the OS install which allows the install
> routine to access and set up the RAID array. In XP I had to slipstream
> the drivers into the installation. Will openSuSE support the onboard
> RAID and would it automatically find and pick it up during install?
>
> Has anyone here used this MB with openSuSE? This board is only 4 months
> old so don’t really fancy having to bin it and get something new.
I use that MB. Your impression of the nVidia chipset is completely
wrong. With the standard 11.1 kernel, the proprietary drivers work
just fine. When I use bleeding-edge kernels, I download the driver
from the nVidia site and build it. If you don’t need 3D acceleration,
the built-in driver nv works without needing a special driver. I use
that on my laptop, but the desktop runs MythTV and television needs
the acceleration.
I’m using that board right now. It works flawlessly with openSuse and every other distro I’ve used. Nvidia driver are as simple as using the 1 click install. Works every time for me.
I don’t use raid either. I have in the past when hard drives were small compared to todays. I find it safer to put all OS’s on the same hard drive and use the other for safe storage of files. With the spare drive formatted as NTFS you can have read / write access from Windows and Linux. You probably already know all this.
Thanks. That’s encouraging to know that it all works well. I am using RAID mirroring at the moment. If it’s not supported it’s not a big deal but would be nice.
I’m using asus motherboard on all my systems and never had a problem, right now m2n on desktops, and a m3 on a 7/7 data server.
The only thing mandatory to do after install is to switch to nvidia graphics driver. the free one make the X crash easily. (also for a remote server)
for raid, I prefer to rely on linux’s software raid : Sure, I’m losing some performances but I’m sure I’m going to recover all my data in case of motherboard failure/replacement. If this is an issue, put more memory and a better cpu.