nForce2

morpha · n00b Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 20 Location: Portland, OR

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Does Gentoo support nForce2 boards? Cuz RH9 sux.
When I boot the live CD with stages I get a black screen and tons o hard drive activity.

My hardware:
Shuttle SN41G2
Athlon XP 2500 Barton
1Gig DDR400 Samsung unbuffered
Samsung CDRW-DVDROM combo drive
Western Digital WD800JB drive
Floppy
MSI GeForce4 Ti4800SE dualhead/ViVo
Midiman Revolution 7.1 sound (envy24HT)

This hardware configuration may require beta kernels, for ALSA and nforce2 support. Can you emerge beta-sources during an install?
Seems like the video card may also be a problem (there is an MX440 onboard).

Any response greatly appreciated.

cduchesne · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2003 Posts: 14

hi morpha,
yes, gentoo runs very well on an nforce2; i myself am using an a7n8x deluxe with the xfs kernel. the problem you are experiencing has to do with the framebuffer. when you have a gig or more of system memory, the system cannot use the memory on your video card, therefore the framebuffer fails to load. so my suggestion is to boot via the command "boot: nofb" or to simply take out a stick of memory when installing. this problem bothers me a lot because who would have thought that having more memory could ever be a bad thing? i've heard that there is a fix for the framebuffer error, but have yet to see find it. well anyways, good luck with your install
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MSI K8T Neo
Athlon64 3200+
GF4 Ti4400
1024 MB PC3200
Gentoo 1.4

Yak · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 01 Sep 2002 Posts: 107

I been fooling around with an A7N8X deluxe, and I got the black screen too. Got it to boot by typing acpi at boot: prompt. Would that have something to do with the framebuffer?

cduchesne · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2003 Posts: 14

i've tried using acpi before, and it doesn't seem to like anything on my computer system. hey yak, how much ram do you have, and what kind of video card?
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WX
MSI K8T Neo
Athlon64 3200+
GF4 Ti4400
1024 MB PC3200
Gentoo 1.4

Anubis · n00b Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 68 Location: BYU

hmm...I just nuked everything and am trying to re-install gentoo myself. It seems that the 1.4 rc3 boot cd hangs on bringing up eth0 with my a7n8x delux board. I'm downloading rc4 right now to see if that fixes the problem. But, I tried to boot twice this morning from cd and neithr time would it get past the ethernet card search. I'll let you know if rc4 has this problem as well.

Actually, does anyone know how to make the boot sequence skip that? As in, make it skip any portion of the detections/startups (the part of the boot up where it says eth0 on the left then ok on the right) by using a keystroke? Thanks.
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

A search for nforce will probably turn up some useful info.
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cduchesne · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2003 Posts: 14

Anubis: using 1.4rc4 will fix your problems. i think there was a problem with the nvidia ethernet drivers in rc3, but I haven't noticed any problems in rc4. Also, if you do have problems, try booting with the option "nonet" and manually start your network interfaces.
_________________
WX
MSI K8T Neo
Athlon64 3200+
GF4 Ti4400
1024 MB PC3200
Gentoo 1.4

Anubis · n00b Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 68 Location: BYU

Thanks for the help, I'll give it a go once I get home!
_________________
The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.

moss · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 18 Location: UK

sounds like your having problems with this bug in the kernel

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19061

I've emailed a patch to lkml and it currently in 2.4.21-rc1-ac4, its bascially a problem with vesafb when you have around 1Gb of RAM and a 128Mg gfx card

Try applying the patch at

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=105169033905090&w=2

see if that helps
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taskara · Posted: Wed May 07, 2003 10:04 am Post subject:

I had this problem too

adding high mem support (3Gb) fixed the problem for me
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Yak · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 01 Sep 2002 Posts: 107

maca · Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2003 3:33 am Post subject:

I had this problem with the nvidia nic as well when probing in the install, I ended up installing from a slackware install.... just unpacked the tarball to the mounted directories and added the nic seperately by emerge nvidia then once its bootable blow away slashware and Im back to gentoo .... this is my experience with it, it is a fairly simple way of getting around it as well, I think
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chiatello · Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2003 4:58 am Post subject:

oh man i had a huge pain getting gentoo installed on my nforce2

but it turns out, the support for the NIC, is not in the kernel

you have to emerge the module, then compile the kernel and what nto add the module to autoload

then reboot and you should be good

Glorandar · Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2003 2:50 pm Post subject: Re: nForce2