As I wrote previously, I have been looking for 24/7 hardware to renew my home system: silent, up-to-date and linux compatible.
Does not sound that hard. But as I kept looking for user experiences, I found hardly any detailed information about AM-2 boards.
A forum I can recommend though is AMDZone – some other information I got from Phoronix.
In the end I decided to get an ASUS M2N-E and give it a shot. My complete setup:
AMD Athlon 64×2 3800+
ASUS M2N-E
2 GByte Aeneon DDR2 566MHz
ASUS EN7300GT Silent/HTD
Western Digital 320GByte RAID Edition
What’s the worst that could happen?
First of all, a stupid mistake on my part: I ordered a Zalman CNPS7700 Cu, which is a really nice and quiet cooler, but unfortunately not compatible with AMD’s new AM2-Socket, as I discovered while trying to install the system.
Problem is, there hardly any coolers made for the new socket, so I had to take Zalman’s top of the line model, the 9500 AM2. But it’s silent alright, and really easy to install.
After plugging everything together the system booted. So I inserted my freshly downloaded Kubuntu Edgy Beta CD and? Kernel Panic
Nice, but not totally unexpected, as these things happen with new hardware, if ACPI isn’t fully supported yet. Tried a current Knoppix anyway, resulting also in a kernel panic. After that I tried the Kubuntu Disc with disabled ACPI (’noapic acpi=off pci=bios’), but booting the live-/install-system took hours. Which means more or like 10 minutes, but one gets impatient in these situations.
When it finally had loaded nothing worked as it should be, the cursor jumped around and in the end the system froze. After that I took the system inside out, tried different CD-drives, ran memtest, …
Long story short, after 3 hours of pluging in and out almost every component I took a break, thought about the situation and then updated the BIOS. After that everything worked (almost) flawlessly. I used a Ubuntu install CD instead of Kubuntu, because the installer on the kubuntu disc had some issues with manual parititioning. Afterwards I simply installed kubuntu-desktop to get my beloved KDE.
What follows are the problems I had with my hardware:
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A bit of an exagguration, but all the hardware worked out of the box, especially the onboard gbit NIC and spdif. For AC3-passthrough simply use this with mplayer:
mplayer -ao alsa -ac hwac3
With Xine/Kaffeine you set output to passthrough and might need to disable “mixer_software” and might, depending on your Dolby Digital Receiver need to force the ouput to 48KHz in kcontrol.
Configuring Cool’n'Quiet, extra repositories, … take a look here.
Something to look at is always nice. My desktop right now looks like this:
After that I had to try this:
If you would like to see this in action, have a look at this.
btw: ASUS got a nice tool to flash the bios directly from usb-stick right from the BIOS (EZFlash). You are also able to backup the old BIOS to stick in advance, really convinient.
Hello, I’d just like to thank you for confirming this board works alright. I’ve been in the market for about 3 years and don’t feel like waiting any longer.
Just thought I’d say thank you.
hi,
i have the Asus M2N-E motherboard and i also have the driver CD that came with it
i am using Xandros v 3.0 premium
and since i am new to the Linux field..i dont know how to install any of the drivers
can u help please?
thanks
@Cory: you are welcome – I mainly wrote this article, because I hadn’t found any concrete information about it before and the problems with the BIOS costed me about 5 hours. I don’t want anyone else to waste their time on the same issue
@Umer: the driver CD probably only contains windows-drivers, which can’t be used with your Xandros distribution. If you have any specific problems, you might email me and I will try to be of assistance.
I got problems with on-board sound: hear no sound under linux. So will u please kindly tell me
1) Do u hear sound from eye-phone connector on the front?
2) What’s yo kernel, what driver do u use, is it module or built-in, are there any parameters?
Oh, sorry, after a long fight i defeated the driver problem myself, by switchin to latest kernel 2.6.19-gentoo
Hello Tobias,
thank you for sharing your experience with M2N-e board.
I’ve ordered a pc with the same motherboard.
Can you share also your lspci and lsmod output, I think it is possible to find a lot of useful informations from these.
And which kernel do you use in ubuntu?
Michele
Hi Michele,
I am currently using 2.6.17, the one shipping with edgy, but am thinking about upgrading to 2.6.19, because it has a patch enabling lm_sensors to detect my thermal sensors correctly.
*spam*
lsmod:
lspci:
Hi Tobias,
thanks for your answer!
Hello,
I want to ask, what is need to make my desktop same like yours ?
have – mb: m2n-e, cpu: ath 3+x64, ram: 2×512/800mhz, vc: asus ati x1300 silent, distro: Slackware 11
thank you!
Hi multi,
which version are you talking about: 2D or 3D?
The Howto on getting started with XGl and Beryl for show off 3D-effects is linked in the article. There should be similar instructions regarding slackware on the net, I’d guess.
My KDE-desktop (just the 2D) is somewhat more difficult to describe, what I consider “my look and feel”. I will try to write a short article about my modifications to the kubuntu default settings, if you or anybody else is interested in that.
so long,
Tobias
Hi Tobias,
i talking about the 3D version. What is need to install xgl ? aiglx ? compiz ? beryl ? dropline gnome ? whats support my video (ati x1300) witch drivers ? i have no idea what it’s depends on what
Slackware 11, Xorg 6.9.0 did i need to install Xorg 7.1
how to start Xgl or ?
sorry about my english!
10q
as far as I unerstand, XGL and AIGLX are competetive projects, as are compiz and beryl. Actually Beryl being a fork of compiz.
In the article I linked this
http://wiki.xglusers.de/index.php/Xgl_mit_Kde
tutorial, because this was exactly what I did. I followed it step by step. Most of the steps should be identical with slackware, except the package installations. Since I have never worked with slackware, I am not familiar with its packaging system, but there are probably a few guides around on how to install xgl etc.
Anyways, it seems to be possible to do with Slackware, as this video proofs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0RcVfUuC1c
On your ATI card:
It has been some time since I had to use the fglrx-driver. I unfortunately can not tell you anything about stability or feature support first hand, but usually you should not have any limitations with the RV515 core (aka x1300).
good luck
Hi Tobias, thanks for writing your experience. I’m looking for some information concerning AM2 motherboards compatibility with linux. As you said, it has being hard to find good informations as you provided.
I may buy this board and try mandriva 2007 on it. First, I will make the bios update… Then, I will post in your site the results. BTW you don’t need to publish this message.
Best regards,
Fabio
Hi there,
Thanks for the suggestions.
I’ve just purchased this motherboard, and have no luck after doing a kernel recompile in slackware 11. I get a blank screen, just after it tries to up the interface (as shown from /var/log/messages.) Nothing else after that. the standard kernels work fine.
It works fine with bare.i or huge26.s kernels, except for networking and sound (add in soundcard, m-audio revo 7.1. supported perfectly well in 2.6.17.x kernels.) After doing the recomended updates (mostly security related), it no longer works (just after logging in, I get a blank screen.)
I’ve tried compiling a kernel with no acpi support, but still with no luck.
Any further suggestions?
p.s. I’ve also tried ubuntu alternative 6.06 (so I can experiment software raid 1.)
Thanks,
Mike.
Hi Mike,
have you updated the boards BIOS already?
You don’t have to recompile your kernel to boot without ACPI, you simply can append those options:
“noapic acpi=off pci=bios”
when booting (if you are using grub as a boot-manager you can simply type “e” when the boot-menu pops up and append these options).
Hi Tobias,
Yes, I’ve got the latest BIOS from Asus website yesterday. (0807).
Funny, with the kubuntu 6.06 livecd, the onboard gigabit nic works fine. But I need to know which module is being used to make it work. All the precompiled slackware kernels I have tried so far do not work. I also need to compile in support for SMP, so both of the CPU cores work.
My m-audio revolution 7.1 sound card appears to be working so far.
Any ideas as to how I find out which kernel module to include so the onboard network works? Or what driver I need to download and use? I’ve been doing some poking around in google, but I haven’t found anything to download.
Thanks again,
Mike.
I found out my problem.
It was my OLD pci radeon 7000 64mb card. Some how I haven’t compiled the drivers for it correctly. If I don’t fix it tonight, then I might go buy one from either NCIX.com or memoryexpress (local). I figure I could use a new one anyways.
Ayways, thanks for your suggestions so far.
Cheers,
Mike.
Hello again,
Sorry for all the posts in a row.
It turned out to be me not including plug and play PCI support, and a few other things. I also had to select the correct USB device drivers to get USB working. There was also a Radeonfb that I disabled, but I can’t seem to find it again.
All in all, it works very well now.
Hopefully everyone can learn from my mistake, and to comb through the kernel menuconfig completely. Backing up the .config file when you get something working is something I recomend doing. Also, you don’t have to run make mrproper every time, since doing so deletes the .config file. Just copy the .config file to your home dir when you have it the way you like. That way you can copy it back, when it comes to upgrade your kernel again.
I also do believe the BIOS update helped out, since I wasn’t getting very far with the original BIOS.
Anyways, cheers for having this blog on your site.
I’m happy to say, that as of early this morning (around 4am), I have a working AM2 based linux box!
Regards,
Mike.
Great, that you got it working. I personally am no friend of recompiling the kernel myself, I leave that to the experts. Any time I tried it, I ended up having a kernel that was even less functional than the one installed by default. And running debian/ubuntu-based distributions you even can upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6 without serious problems. Granted, my last try in compiling a self-made kernel where back in the 2.4-days when I wasn’t that familiar with everything.
I have an odd problem with the onboard sound. mplayer can play straight PCM or downmixed AC3 through the SPDIF out but if I use the -ac hwac3 option, I get nothing but noise, kind of like if you sent AC3 data straight to a PCM output. I’ve been using two Sound Blaster cards (an Audigy and a Live 5.1) in the motherboard with no problems at all (good thing it has three PCI 2.2 slots). I’m using the latest alsa (14rc3).
Could you share your .asound file? Maybe there’s a trick in there.
Hi Scott,
I am having a few troubles with the onboard sound myself currently. Since updating to feisty fawn analog material isn’t mixed on SPDIF through pcm.default, so my configuration seems also not to be ideally, but I am working on that
Currently I am neither using a ~/.asoundrc nor /etc/asound.conf – so I could be offering is kubuntu’s /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf if you like to.
Since I had still trouble with the onboard sound with feisty now being final, I tried a different approach an compiled alsa manually, which worked just fine.
I used this howto
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=406676
Now everythings seems to be working fine again.
Hallo,
Ich wollte fragen ob Sata hotplug mit diesem Mainboard funktioniert?
Also ob beim einstecken einer sata Festplatte, udev Signale vom Kernel bekommt.
Als Modul müsste ja sata_nv eingebunden sein.?
Angeblich sollen alle nForce Chipsätze hotplug unterstützen.
Ich habe aber leider schon die Erfahrung gemacht, dass es trotzdem nicht funktioniert. (nVidia Crush Chipsatz (ich glaube nForce 430) in einem Asus Pundit).
Vielen Dank
Micha
Hallo Micha,
kann ich Dir leider nichts zu sagen, da ich’s nicht getestet habe. Hot-Swapping bzw. Hot-Plugging würde ich im Normalfall auch selten einem Onboard-Chip anvertrauen, da wäre ein ordentlicher RAID-Controller von 3Ware oder dergleichen schon eher angebracht.
Sollte ich die nächsten Tage allerdings noch eine S-ATA-Platte in die Finger bekommen, kann ich es ja einfach mal ausprobieren. Was soll schon schiefgehen?
hi, i just want to know if you still have problems with this MB in ubuntu. I work in ubuntu 8.04 and i want to buy this MB but dont wanna have so many problems. Can you help me?
thanks in advance
Greetings from Venezuela
Edwind