In december 2004 I bought myself a brandnew ASUS P5GD1 motherboard and struggled for more than a week to get everything going under Linux, so I thought it would be nice to list my adventures here, so as to avoid other people having to repeat the same steps, searches and mistakes ;-)
More details about these steps can be found further in this document, but to give you already some idea : I have most parts working now without too much hassle. In most cases I just needed to get and compile the very latest kernels and the latest Alsa driver for the sound. Only real problems where :
Finally I decided to drop the Parallel IDE disks and buy new Serial ATA disks , sigh ...
A working 2.6 driver is available at SysKonnect :
Getting the SATA interface to work was not very complicated : you'll just need a standard 2.4 or 2.6 kernel with builtin libata support for the ICH6R Southbridge. At least the 2.4.28 kernel works fine. The driver sits in the kernel menu's under SCSI => Low-level drivers.
Note that the disk will be recognized as a SCSI disk and thus uses names like /dev/sda , /dev/sda1 etc. instead of the PATA /dev/hda, /dev/hda1 names.
Of course the libata driver should be integrated in the kernel and not be compiled as a module or else you can't mount the disk (unless you'll plan to boot from a disk on the standard IDE interface).
To boot from S-ATA you must set the motherboard accordingly and that was a little difficult to find in the initial BIOS (by default it only showed P-ATA devices) but that seems to be improved now.
Although both the ITERAID driver supplied on CD and the driver in the 2.6.10 kernel compiled fine and even reported the attached disks I wasn't able to read any data either from CD's or harddisks.
Either the ITE8212 is VERY buggy (even reported once by the Linux kernel !) or there is something wrong with my motherboard. However, I decided to forget about the damned thing and use Serial ATA and the Single standard Parallel IDE interface instead (see also above).
As also the BIOS initialisation for the ITE8212 took a very long time and sometimes even failed to detect all connected devices I disabled it completely in the BIOS, to make startup a little faster.
Initially I just used my old SoundBlaster Live, but I nevertheless decided to try the onboard High Definition Audio as well. First attempt was the Alsa-based Integrated Audio Driver aud_linux_1.5_beta_sh.gz from Intel at http://downloadfinder.intel.com
That seemed to work well although it was extremely simple: I had just one volume control and one igain slider in kmix and that was it ;-)
Then I tried to get the latest Alsa driver from http://www.alsa-project.org/ (version 1.0.8rc1) and that one worked flawlessly and even had a lot more controls in alsamixer or kmix. Note however that you'll have to use the snd-azx module.
Nevertheless, as I think the Sound-Blaster is still more powerful (e.g. hardware multiplexing of multiple sound streams) I stick to that one for the time being.
Update Aug 2005 : in the latest Alsa 1.0.9 driver the snd-azx module was renamed to snd-hda-intel !
The standard sk98lin drivers in both the 2.4.27-28, 2.6.9-2.6.10 and even 2.6.10-ac2 kernels didn't work, probably because the interface is still too new. But as said above the install-7_04.tar.bz2 driver on the ASUS CD worked fine under 2.4.x kernels.
However, this ASUS driver failed to compile on 2.6.x. After searching the web for a LONG time I found a driver at SysKonnect with version number install-8_12.tar.bz2 and that one compiles and works fine, even for the latest kernels :
Update Aug 2005: for 2.6.12 kernels you must fetch at least install-8_23.tar.bz2 or else it won't compile.
Disable USB in the BIOS makes this step being skipped, but then there are no USB devices available under Linux, so this is not a solution. Anyone else with the same experience on the P5GD1 or do I simply have a faulty motherboard ?
No idea why, but this is a pity as it makes the USB 2.0 disk rather slow for interactive work (e.g. videostreaming).
In my stupidity I tried to push my almost new Nvidia Geforce 4 AGP card in the PCI-E slot but that of course didn't fit ;-(
I decided to buy a cheap ATI-Radeon PCI-Express (80,- EUR) but that one seemed to be broken as the screen was instable, both on a CRT and TFT monitor : small diagonals bars appeared after a few minutes and were moving over the screen. This even happened while in the BIOS so it couldn't be a faulty driver.
As also the ATI-Radeon 3D drivers for Linux proved to be a big nuisance (the installation procedure is very chaotic and cumbersome) I decided to return the card and buy an Nvidia EN6600-TD ( 156,- EUR).
Ok, somewhat expensive but what a difference ! The old AGP Nvidia-6629 driver worked fine with this new card without even a re-install, but now with superior and super fast 3D grahpics. There was a small problem with the rendering of the runway lights in my favorite Flight Simulator FlightGear (this was partly done in software, so it was very slow) but that was fixed in Nvidia-7667. Even at high resolutions (1280X1024) I now easily get 50 frames/second !
So, at least for Linux there is IMO only one real videocard vendor : Nvidia ! Their cards are perfect and they are one of the few companies who really understood how to make smooth, stable, fast and easy to install drivers for Linux.
Latest drivers can be found at : http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html
Anyway, the latest drivers from SysKonnect also work fine under 2.6.9 and up.
But, if you want to use the HD Audio on the board : just use the latest Alsa drivers.