James Wilkinson wrote: >Marlin Borsick wrote: >> This is a kernel issue that several of us have been looking into. From >>what dialogue we've had, apparently two slots on the motherboard is >> disabled as the kernel doesn't know how the handle the motherboard. >Jon Shorie: you said you were having problems with PCI graphics cards. >This means you need to try them in different PCI slots! Have you done >so? >James. Yes I have. There are 2 pci slots, 1 pci express x1, and 1 AGP slot on this board. It does not matter which slot I use: PCI1, PCI2 or AGP (I do not have a PCI Express X1 Graphics Card). Same Result. The board has a new onboard video chip VIA MultiChrome instead of the VIA Unichrome that is on most Via chipset boards. This seems to interfere with the video even if there is an agp card inserted. Also, Fedora 5 Identifies the Northbridge as Via P4M800CE instead of P4M800Pro which may also affect the agp. Finally, there is a new southbridge which is the 8251. This is connected to both the PCI Express and PCI busses. If I do a text mode install here, I can get the system to boot up in text mode, but pci and pci-express cards are not recognized. VIA has released a patch to support the ATA and SATA support for the 8251. It only works with Fedora 2-4. It also requires building a custom kernel. The patch still does not support the PCI Express slots properly. Some people have managed to get this to work with Fedora Core 5, but without complete success. Because of all of these problems, I have decided to purchase a different motherboard for this server. Here is the board that I have purchased instead: Biostar P4M800M7A Socket 775 Motherboard http://www.biostar-usa.com/mbdetails.asp?model=p4m80-m7a+v7.x It uses the P4M800 northbridge and the VT8237 Southbridge. It also has S3 UniChrome integrated graphics. I have a couple of servers using this northbridge/southbridge/graphics combination running under Fedora Core 4. They are rock solid stable under Core 4. Thank you all for all of the help on this issue. I think that it still is something that needs resolved for the future, because I will be purchasing more servers later this year and may not have much luck finding the 8237 bases boxes then. Again, thanks Jon Shorie Systems Administrator Medina County Sanitary Engineers
