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.