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
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