MEPIS 3.3.1 won;t work with Genuine intel OEM Mainboards D915 series

Ok, still have not been able to make MEPIS work with the intel D915GAG mainboard, but Suse 9.2 and Xandros 3.0 are working with it, although Xandros needs to be booted a VESA mode.

RossD.

It's another day here and I have spent a good deal of the last 9 hours trying to get MEPIS running on this intel m/board system.

MEPIS still fails to install, even after trying to force vesa mode (which worked in Xandros) and tying things like forcing i810.

Kubuntu also works fine without any extra commands, as does Mandrake, so at present it is only MEPIS that won't boot.

No word from MEPIS support on this problem yet, either here or by email reply.

RossD.

Have you tried both kernels.... 2.4 and 2.6.

For the hell of it try it with these boot parms:

noapic nolapic acpi=off

and see if that helps. Doubt it but can't hurt to try.

Al

hi for what its worth, I have a new system with D915Gav mb 1g mem and a
single port sata drive. I was able to get Mepis 3.3 to boot, painfully
slow,almost 10 min to boot. I used xdrvr =vesa,it can't detect the on board sound,and sometimes it can't find certain applications. Ive used
Knoppix no cheat code needed, but have problems with k3b(disk burner).
the only live Cd that I got to work with reasonable speed is Mepis
2.?? ,no cheat code needed.

thanks good luck

Submitted by acanton on Tue, 05/24/2005 - 22:14. *new

Have you tried both kernels.... 2.4 and 2.6.

For the hell of it try it with these boot parms:

noapic nolapic acpi=off

and see if that helps. Doubt it but can't hurt to try.

Al

I have tried both kernels, and a couple of different versions of MEPIS, as well as acpi=off and a heap of other parameters.

None of the distros that do work are detecting the sound, and checking the web shows that this is a known problem. I downloaded the fix from intel, and that didn't work, so I threw in a PCI sound card and disabled the on-board sound. Sound is now working.

Of the distros that work, only Xandros requires the vesa parameter.

I checked out all the distros I have here and the only one other than MEPIS that has Flash and Java installed by default is a magazine cover DVD of Suse 9.2. As I type this, Suse is copying a DVD using K3B without any obvious problems, so it looks as if we have to convert our customers to Suse for the time being.

There has been no word back from MEPIS support yet to even acknowledge they are aware of the problem.

RossD.

I wish I had some advise for you, but I don't. For the hell of it you might give Kanotix a try. I've yet to hear of any hardware that it does not detect.... but I'm sure there is some. I've had good luck with it on a laptop that Mepis does not run well on.
http://kanotix.com/info/index.php

It's a KDE / Debian based liveCD distro like Mepis. Except for the silly water and fish wallpaper the distro is well done and like Mepis it gets rave reviews from those who use it. Can't hurt to give it a try.

Let us know.

Al

Thanks Al,

The plan at the moment is to sit tight on MEPIS for our own systems. We have some customers who have Xandros and some who have Mepis, so support is no more difficult than supporting a few versions of Windows.

New customers will have to use Suse and I am in the middle of finding the libdvdcss and w32codecs and setting them up on a supplement Cd for customers.

If MEPIS support fix the problem we'll probably go back to MEPIS for customers.

At present, Suse is still the only serious competitor to MEPIS for out of the box operation of flash, acroread and java etc, and the free DVD has just about everything needed except the codecs.

Still heard nothing from MEPIS support on this. Not even a reply to my email saying they are aware of the problem and whether they are working on it.

RossD.

Thanks Al,

The plan at the moment is to sit tight on MEPIS for our own systems. We have some customers who have Xandros and some who have Mepis, so support is no more difficult than supporting a few versions of Windows.

New customers will have to use Suse and I am in the middle of finding the libdvdcss and w32codecs and setting them up on a supplement Cd for customers.

If MEPIS support fix the problem we'll probably go back to MEPIS for customers.

At present, Suse is still the only serious competitor to MEPIS for out of the box operation of flash, acroread and java etc, and the free DVD has just about everything needed except the codecs.

Still heard nothing from MEPIS support on this. Not even a reply to my email saying they are aware of the problem and whether they are working on it.

RossD.

"At present, Suse is still the only serious competitor to MEPIS for out of the box operation of flash, acroread and java etc, and the free DVD has just about everything needed except the codecs."

I'd say PCLinuxOS is a pretty good option.

It wasn't last time I looked. I will have to get the latest download and see.
My biggest problem with Suse is finding packages. Apt sort of makes me lazy.

RossD.

p.s.

There is STILL no word from MEPIS support about the intel board problem. They obviously either don;t care about hardware support, or they simply don;t intend supporting intel products.

First, are all of these boot issues with 3.3.1?

We are currently looking into the issue. What would help the effort is (for the systems that boot) send the results of "kudzu -p" to along with the Brand/Model of the system or Make/Model of the motherboard and your version of MEPIS.

Currently, some Intel 915 systems/boards work. We need to isolate the ones that don't and find the issue.

If your system is installed and booting, please make sure to update meauto and reboot before submitting. There are some solutions provided already in the latest package.

David

Thank you David,

As I mentioned in my post to and in the first post in this thread, my problem is the D915GAG board, and the system would not boot from the live CD using ANY command line options I had available.

I had the system on the bench for around a week while I was preparing it for delivery, and there was no response form suport either here, or via email.

In that time I tested it with all the distros mentioned earlier in this post, while awaiting some suggestions from mepis.com.

After trying a number of distros, and because the customer had run out of patience, I eventually delivered it with Suse 9.2, which was the only other distro with a fairly full application set AND java and flash working, although I did have to dig up an mp3 encoder and win32codecs.

Of all the distros tested, the only one other than MEPIS that would not boot initially was Xandros (version 2 & 3), however this was easily solved by using the vesa option - one of the things that did not work in MEPIS.

These are the sorts of things that we were having investigated when we had the testers' mailing list running. Possibly, if it had been still running, this would have been investigated before 3.3.1 got to final release.

At this point, we have mostly genuine IBM's going out, and I am reluctant to spend another $1000.00 on testing this problem, as I had to do with the MSI board problem.

My budget for testing MEPIS releases has already been exceeded this year.

RossD.

More testing on one of these genuine intel 915 boards has shown that the two components that MEPIS 3.3.1 does not like (so far) are the on-board sound, and the on-board video.

Adding a PCI sound card solves the sound problem, adding a PCI video card, or using a different Linux distro solves the video problem.

I have not had the opportunity to find out if the non-genuine boards using the 915 chipset have this problem.

RossD.

And yet more testing on the genuine intel 915GAG mainboard...

MEPIS is the only Linux distro I can find that doesn't recognise the on-board NIC.

This means that the simple fix for this mainboard is to:

Install the board
Replace the on-board video with a PCI card.
Replace the on-board sound with a PCI card.
Look longingly at the PCI card in the hand, and the 2 x PCI slots on the m/board, and replace the OS with another Linux distro.

Unfortunately, none of the other Linux distros perform as well as MEPIS...

So I can have MEPIS with video and sound, or video and networking, or sound and networking on a black screen.

RossD.

Some snooping shows that intel has released a collection of drivers for this board for some versions of Linux, as far back as May 2004.

The link is:

http://developer.intel.com/design/motherbd/ag/ag_drive.htm

There are also pages of drivers for the other boards in the series except the 945.

Maybe it is possible for the MEPIS team to use information from these drivers to make MEPIS work with the intel boards.

There are quite a few other boards out there now also using this chipset, as well as the genuine boards.

RossD.

Hey RossD.
Are you still having same problems as I am on the Intel boards. I have try Mepis on many of the 915 boards that you have too. It is a problem with all of them Mepis does not like the PCI Express, sound and Network card. Intel has newer chipsets out now for the dual core processor I would think these would be a problem too. There has to be alot of people out there with these problems as purchasing a new system would have these chipsets and intel boards are very popular with alot of manufactures have intel boards in them. I like Mepis alot but cannot use or have people try and use it on there systems as we deal intel most of the time. Will post if anything different happens.
Thanks Greg

Does Kanotix work with these 915 boards? How about 'pure' Debian?

Have you heard anything else from the Mepis folks?

My bet is that there will be an update very, very soon... probably with the new 2.6.12 kernel that came out today.

Are these 915 mobos being used in commercial boxen (Dell, HP, etc.?)

Please keep us posted. No one wants to go out and buy a new machine and find that it is a paperweight with Mepis!

-Al

Dell Dimension 4700 and 4700c use the 915g Express chipset.
Neither play friendly with Mepis at this time.

q

On a largely unrelated note- Linux 2.6.12 w/ the ck patch on Mepis is blistering fast.

please ignore.

Can I get everyone to send a kudzu -p to ? I have not seen one for these boards yet. I want to make sure that I get everything automatically loaded properly with the meauto utilities.

And yes, this is something that I am trying to roll into 2.6.12 as well.

David

What is 'ck patch'? I don't suppose you could give us a step by step list on how you compiled the kernel... and what NOT to do ??? I'd like to try 6.12 compiled to my own hardware.

Al

The "ck patch" is a high-performance kernel patch created by Con Kolivas, available at:

http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/

The patch contains various kernel hacks, as well as, very efficient RAM and swap file governing (no more traditional "swappiness").

I will try to write a functional howto for "rolling your own" soon.