!!!!!!!!!!! For every owner of one NForce Mainboard !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[CSlayeR]

Let's begin with my story:

Two months ago i bought one Epox 8RDA+ and one ABit Siluro GF4 Ti4200-8x (before i had one GF3Ti500 on Epox 8KHA+, very good mainboard by the way). And i installed my system again, I always use dual boot (Linux/Windows). Firstly I installed win2K, the instalation was a nightmare .. very very slow because win2k does not know the ide controler from the Nforce2 mainboars and is running in PIO4, but after i installed the 2.0 nforce drivers the system got new life. After some problems with the soundcard (so called soundstorm) i disable it and i started using my old SBLive 5.1 Creative (much better for my DDT2200). With NForce 2 i can not use 5 channels and the microphone toghether, the microphone input is used for output if you use soundstorm on 6 channels.
I runned all the benchmarks i got then, i was quite satisfied with the performance gain from my old system. Couple of weeks ago I was interested in the upcomming RedHat 8.1 (now is 9.0) and i installed it on the free space left on my hardrive for thar purpose only. Quicky got the accelerated X drivers from www.nvidia.com (at that time 4191 was the latest) and like i done it before i installed them... but suprize .... no chance to start X-server.
After 3 weeks of changing distros , couples of hundred of kernels,5 mainboard bioses, reading all the treads of this forum i gived up and i started waiting for nvidia's new driver release.
I tried in this order this distros RH8.1beta3, RH8.0, RH7.3 , SlackWare 8.0, Suse 8.1, with kernels 2.4.18,2.4.19-vanilla,2.4.20,2.4.21-pre5. .. and all latest 3 accelerated drivers from nvidia.
The new driver are now released and you can see for yourself... the new set of drivers are with problems too.. lots of them.
For me now the x is running accelerated but i can not switch to text mode, my system hangs at Ctrl-Alt-F1..F6 and same thing at logout. Now i have ony one problem.. When will nvidia release new set of drivers .. in couple of months ? or maybe next year?

I forgot .. the LAN onboard is one crap.... try to find another lan card, even one PCI RTL8139 is much better than that from NForce2.
That things i can say about SoundStorm, in linux SoundStorm realy stinks... If is so good like it is reviewed on the internet why does not have good drivers with real settings, not i810 modified drivers. i810 is one soundcard used on intel mainboards .. one ac97 codec. ac97 codec soundcards were never good no difference in them.
Another beautifull part of nvidia's chipset. the ide controler have very bad support in linux... try to benchmark your harddrive and you will be surprized.

Another beautifull thing .... the agp controller. Anyone have another card but what is not made with one of nvidia's chipsets?
I think he has problem getting XFree86 to work with DRI.
So because of nvidia's driver licence policies no agpgart in the near future, no good ide controler support, no usb support, no sound suport, no good lan drivers...

Why should i (the buyer) by one NForce2 mainboard???

NForce 2 IN LINUX IS CRAP ... GO BUY ONE VIA Mainboard if you want linux ((



SlayeR

Last thing:
If you are one linux user go buy one via or intel mainboard ... no nvidia.:confused:

[bms20]

I don't think this is the case.

I'm running RedHat 8.0 on the same motherboard (Epox-8rda+) with an Athlon XP2700, and it is very very stable. This computer is on for approximately 12 hours a day, and I have yet to see a crash or problems relating to the nvidia setup. X works fine, and so does the virtual consoles.

Here is what I have running:
Athlon XP2700
1GB (2x 512MB CAS2.5 TwinMOS) DDR400 dimms
WinFast A250 Ultra (GeForce Ti4600)
IBM 46Gb hard disk (the crap ones that break)

My computer dual boots windows 2000 and RedHat 8.0.

This is how I set it up:
1) Install Windows 2000 and configure.
2) Download nForce platform drivers and GeForce driver.
3) Install RH8
4) edit /etc/inittab to boot into runlevel 3
5) boot and log in as root.
6) Install the kernel source (if you didn't in the install phase)
7) Build and install the nForce drivers
8) Run the newest gfx driver installer.
9) Edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and change the nv driver to nivida
10) Edit /etc/inittab and restore the boot runlevel to 5
11) Reboot and have fun

What NVidia need to do is release a new platform driver for this board, or (preferably) open source the code for it. This would give us support for ieee-1394, system monitoring (i2c) and APIC support so we could get the second USB channel to work.

For such a nice board, its a shame that we can't use all of the features!

-Brett

[bms20]

Oh, I forgot to mention one other step:

11) Edit /etc/rc.d/sysinit.d and add:
/sbin/hdparm -d1 -c1 /dev/hda

as the first line executed in the file. This will enable dma and 32bit i/o support. On my computer this improves the hard disk bandwidth from about 3mb/s to around 33mb/s.

Hopefully this step will be unnecessary with redhat 9.

-Brett

[CSlayeR]

for bsm20:

This is the 8-th year I am using Linux... I had 8 computers until now and this is not the first time i am instaling the drivers for nvidia.
My job is Network and System Engineer and i have good linux practice.
1. I think the problem is my agp AGP 8x card ... Abit Siluro GF4 Ti4200 AGP 8x. Maybe te bios from the card need to be ungraded .. idono. I will try that too.
2. 33Mb /s with that hardrive is not so much. (I achieved that much .. but with how much cpu usage ?? What is your usual cpu usage when your linux is using the hardrive
3. Please send you XF86Config file to this address slayer at security.rootkit.info.