# Asus M2N (nForce 430) and Gentoo

## batzee

Hi *,

I have a brand new ASUS M2N mainboard with the nForce 430 MCP chipset.

This is the list of devices I already got working:

1.) SATA harddisk:

--> SCSI device support

<*> SCSI device support

<*> SCSI disk support

--> SCSI Low-Level-Drivers:

<*> Serial ATA (SATA) support

<*>   NVIDIA SATA support

Since I have only one harddisk I have disabled the RAID function in BIOS.

2.) Ethernet NIC:

Unfortunately the NIC was not supported by Knoppix, nor by the Gentoo Install-CD 2006.1 So I had to plug in an old realtek card for installation. After installing my own kernel the nforce nic was then recognized:

--> network device support

--> Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit)  

[*] EISA, VLB, PCI and on board controllers

<*>   nForce Ethernet support

3.) Sound card.

Well, the sound card is not working  :Sad: 

It is shown in lspci as:

00:05.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio (rev a2)

Has someone got this to work??

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## dev-urandom

I have the same motherboard. I can answer some of your questions.

 *batzee wrote:*   

> 
> 
> 1.) SATA harddisk:
> 
> --> SCSI device support
> ...

 

This should work IMHO. I use a PATA disk with the minimal stuff needed and I have a NAS box which servers rest of the data, so I really can't help you if you have a problem with the SATA support. Last time I googled nv_sata was decently maintained though.

 *batzee wrote:*   

> 
> 
> 2.) Ethernet NIC:
> 
> Unfortunately the NIC was not supported by Knoppix, nor by the Gentoo Install-CD 2006.1 So I had to plug in an old realtek card for installation. After installing my own kernel the nforce nic was then recognized:
> ...

 

I am not sure when support for the onboard nic was added, but it is detected on all recent kernels - 2.6.15 and up. There is a bug with the MAC addressing, it detects mine in the reverse which screws up my NAS' arp cache, and my dhcp server's addressing. I have a local patch for it which I can give you if you face the same problem.

 *batzee wrote:*   

> 
> 
> 3.) Sound card.
> 
> Well, the sound card is not working 
> ...

 

I have had good success. You need either the latest alsa (I guess this is fixed upstream), or you'll need to patch the source again to get this to work. The driver is the same hda-snd-intel, and the patch is trivial. Open up the file <kernel>/sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c. Scroll over to 

```

static struct pci_device_id azx_ids[] __devinitdata = {
```

and add this somewhere inside this struct (around line 1628 in my system.)

```
        { 0x10de, 0x03f0, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, AZX_DRIVER_NVIDIA }, /* NVIDIA 03f0 */

```

This gives you the basic features of the soundcard - with the laptop board configuration, which work perfectly fine for me, since I use an audigy for nontrivial purposes. (I need the onboard sound only for sip soft phones.) I've been trying to get this working in a decent and fuller way, mostly out of my love to learn kernel hacking, but so far I've only managed to freeze my system  :Sad: 

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## batzee

 *dev-urandom wrote:*   

> 
> 
> I am not sure when support for the onboard nic was added, but it is detected on all recent kernels - 2.6.15 and up. There is a bug with the MAC addressing, it detects mine in the reverse which screws up my NAS' arp cache, and my dhcp server's addressing. I have a local patch for it which I can give you if you face the same problem.
> 
> 

 

I don't know which kernel Knoppix 5.01 uses, but it definitely does not recognize the onboard nic. But this was no problem as I had an old realtek PCI card which I plugged in for installation only and removed it afterwards.

By the way, do you know if the ethernet driver supports Gigabit?

 *dev-urandom wrote:*   

> 
> 
> I have had good success. You need either the latest alsa (I guess this is fixed upstream), or you'll need to patch the source again to get this to work. The driver is the same hda-snd-intel, and the patch is trivial. Open up the file <kernel>/sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c. Scroll over to 
> 
> ```
> ...

 

This really works! Great  :Smile: 

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## dev-urandom

 *batzee wrote:*   

> 
> 
> By the way, do you know if the ethernet driver supports Gigabit?

 

It does, for me - ethtool detects the 1000b/s mode, and I've once managed to reach speeds of 30MB/s so gigE is definitely working. But be careful,  the board has an IRQ bug which causes the computer to freeze under high network loads.

 *batzee wrote:*   

> 
> 
> This really works! Great 

 

Wonderful! That makes more than one person with a working sound card  :Smile: 

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## unbreak

I have the same motherboard and I have too problems with audio. When you say that you need the last version of alsa, are you talking about alsa-utils or alsa-drivers? Because in my case I install alsa in KERNEL as a module and I don't emerge alsa-drivers.

Do you need the lastest alsa-driver and remove the kernel modules from alsa, or you need the lastest kernel??

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## dev-urandom

 *unbreak wrote:*   

> I have the same motherboard and I have too problems with audio. When you say that you need the last version of alsa, are you talking about alsa-utils or alsa-drivers? Because in my case I install alsa in KERNEL as a module and I don't emerge alsa-drivers.
> 
> Do you need the lastest alsa-driver and remove the kernel modules from alsa, or you need the lastest kernel??

 

alsa-driver is all you need.

<disclaimer>

When I say this has been fixed upstream, I am basically assuming it. I am total n00b when it comes to kernel programming, and it took me somewhere like 2 hours to figure out what's wrong and why I could not force the driver to detect the card. I am fully confident that if I post this upstream, they may rather boo at me  :Wink: 

</disclaimer>

Just give it a shot with the alsa-driver package - the latest and the greatest. You'll either need to remove alsa support from your kernel, or an easier way would be to  (this may deprive you of the right to say later that you have an alsa problem - depending on where you post it):

```
mkdir /root/alsa_backup

kern=$(uname -r)

mv /lib/modules/$kern/kernel/sound/ /root/alsa_backup

mkdir -p /lib/modules/$kern/kernel/sound/core/

cp /root/alsa_backup/sound/core/snd.ko /lib/modules/$kern/kernel/sound/core/

```

That much should be able to make your kernel setup alsa-driver ready, assuming that you have everything alsa related compiled as modules. This is off the back of my head though - if you run into problems, just give me a shout.

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## karsten_s

I've just bought new hardware, for the first time in - agh, too long - and it's an ASUS M2N-SLI Board, with nForce 570. aplay gives me splendid output, so far, on wav-files, still waiting for proper mp3-playback software...  :Wink: 

What worked for me was compiling the intel-hda stuff from plain gentoo-sources as modules and then modprobing both snd_codec_hda and snd_intel_hda.

...just thought someone might be interested.

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