What works VIA EPIA 10000 EG and Linux

Ok I am starting to work my way through this.

I have successfully installed Ubuntu 7.04 off of a USB stick (my system has no CD or floppy drives) onto my hard disk and subsequently gotten both the sound and video systems to work -- including the TV-Out using the via drivers that I downloaded from viaarena.com.

NB: The standard 7.10 iso will not boot from USB because somehow or another it loses track of the USB drive during the loading of the linux kernel and dies.  It also has issues with the graphcis driver.

Hints:

• access boot menu by hitting escape
  
• to boot from USB select hard disk (somewhat counter-untuitively) and then boot from add-on card
• Get to the cmos setup by hitting F2
• I usedthe windows version of unetboot-in to create the bootable USB from the ISO image.

There are pitfalls here. First you have to be sure not to upgrade your kernel as the VIA binaries only work (or at least only install) with the original kernel. If you do an upgrade and the Kernel is upgraded, then you can revert to the original and everything works.

I also got Debian Lenny installed in the same way, but here I was unable to get the via binaries to work -- in part because they seem to be set up for Etch not Lenny.

Back to Ubuntu 7.04.

As indicated the via binaries worked and I was able relatively quickly to get video out the TV-Out which is ultimately critical to my project as I want to use this machine as a MythTV Front end.

However, video output was unsatisfactorily slow.  This clearly represented a failure to get the framebuffer to work properly -- something I still have to work on.

I also ran into problems with my sources.list which was generating errors up and down the line, preventing me from installing critical packages such as the series gstream* necessary for playing MP3s etc.  Sooo.. I am restarting from scratch, with a view to re-install 7.04. Upgrade it immediately to 7.10 (which also has binary support from via).

More on how this goes to come.

Seeting uip Apple Airport to run on a PC / linux based system.

To enable the Apple airport music streaming capabilities on a PC-based system you must open three ports:

Port 3689 TCP
Port 5353 UDP
Port 5353 TCP

Installing Linux on VIA EPIA 10000EG

Saturday Nov. 28, 2008

Bought a VIA EPIA 10000EG mobo the other day with the idea of making a completely quiet MythTV front end. Have been spending most of my time since trying to get it running properly.

Basic configuration:

VIA EPIA 10000EG

1 G ram

64MB OCZ Sata II 2.5 solid state disk drive

The system boots knoppix and runs flawlessly -- so we know it works. And actually it is delightfully fast and completely quiet -- no fan, no physical hard disk noise.

Problem is when running the Kubuntu installer (off of USB as we have no cdrom) it blanks out when it runs X. The system is not dieing as if you Ctl-Alt to a TTY session the system is there and you can even close the X session sudo /etc/init.d/kdm stop and restart it. The problem does not go away.

At first I thought that it is sending the output to one of the other video outs on this mobo (S-video, yellow video connector, and digital video out, but even when I access the BIOS and (hit DEL while VIA logo is exposed) and theoretically force it to used only the dvi OUT,I still lose the system at that point.

Mainly to help me keep track of what I am doing I have created this blog.

1 usefull link is http://lukasz.dk/2008/04/23/ubuntu-and-via-epia-en12000eg/


Sunday Nov. 29, 2008

OK, I made a lot of progress -- some of it potentially negative.

First because of the failure to get the standard ubuntu installers to work because they are graphical and the graphics sub-system was not working I Installed Debian 4.0 Lenny instead.

Debian had the same issues.

After the usual stumbling around, I discovered that my main problem earlier was that the VESA module had not been installed. Once that was installed then things ran more or less as expected -- duhh.

The remaining challenge is / was to get the onboard S3 CX700 chrome chip being used to its potential. This requires installing the openchrome module apt-get install openchrome. But even with that I was getting a blank screen -- a problem that seems common.

Finally I found the following post, which offers a script that builds the drivers for you and more importantly writes and xorg.conf file that works.

That script can be found here:
"How to: Compiling and Instralling the OpenChrome Graphical VIA Driver"
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=485646

Although written for ubuntu it worked for me under debian lenny.

Next: Get control over the video out