[conspire] Installing on a ASUS A7N8X Deluxe MB

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Greg Dougherty (rhl at molecularsoftware.com):

> There's a guide at
> http://attila.stevens-tech.edu/~dkopko/a7n8x.txt
> On how to get things working on my MB.  Both nVidia and ASUS have
> updated files to install once I have RHL finally installed and working
> on my computer.  Should I bring a CD with those files to the party
> tomorrow, or will it be just as easy to download what we need?

Sorry to be late in getting back to you.  I hope this reaches you in a
timely manner.

Something Mike Higashi pointed out to me, this morning:  Weren't you
saying, in effect, that you were having problems getting RH to load
onto your system at all?  If that's the case, then a set of files
intended for post-installation application may not help a lot.

To answer your question as posed, the household does have good Internet
connectivity, and I have a reliable, if somewhat pokey, CD burner.

I'm just looking over the indicated document, now.  In general terms,
it's a guide to solving driver problems post-RH8 installation onto an
Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, which evidently uses an NVidia nForce2
base chipset, creating consequent challenges for video, sound, ethernet,
and ATA ("IDE") support.  

The author wants you to initially avoid tangling with Serial ATA
("SATA"), and therefore ensure that you initially have both the hard
drive and the CD drive on the primary ATA channel, i.e., as /dev/hda and
/dev/hdb.  (Ordinarily, you would seek to have ATA drives on different
channels to the extent possible, since ATA doesn't support disconnected
operation, and therefore addresses the two devices on each chain only
alternately, never simuntaneously.)

Post-RH8-installation, he has you run "hdparm -T -t" on your hard drive to
get its technical specs.

He wants you to get kernel 2.4.20 sources, some kernel patches, some
(proprietary?) Nvidia kernel drivers to support their video cards, the
proprietary Nvidia X11 driver for XFree86, ALSA source.  Compile and
install that lot.  Reboot to the new kernel.

Tweak the (thus-revised) ATA driver based on hdparm output.  Adjust
/etc/modules.conf.  Tweak XFree86.  Enable raw DVD access.  Upgrade a
few apps and utilities.  

It all sounds like a perfectly reasonable plan, assuming that RH8's
initial installation works well enough to proceed with the rest of it.

-- 
Cheers,                   The cynics among us might say:   "We laugh, 
Rick Moen                 monkeyboys -- Linux IS the mainstream UNIX now!
rick at linuxmafia.com       MuaHaHaHa!" but that would be rude. -- Jim Dennis