# Minimal nForce setup instructions

## rsk

I saw some people asking about setting up Gentoo on an nForce. My buddy and I (maybe he can add to this) have done and redone this about 50 times since Monday so I'll share some experiences here to maybe help:

If you have an ASUS nForce board, the network driver is the Realtek 8139TOO (when you go to net drivers on board in kernel config, you MIGHT see 2 Realteks listed, hit the help on both of them, one of them, in the top left, says something like "REALTEK8139_TOO" or something like that, that's the one you want"). Don't install the nVidia net driver if you have an Asus, because it won't work. If you have an MSI board, or other board you know uses the nForce network card, then go ahead and install the driver (it works great).

Now to get sound working was kinda tricky, not for any great reason, it just kept not wanting to work for us.

What we ended up doing (your milage may vary) is compile Sound Support (under sound menu) either as a module or into the kernel, THEN you compile the nvaudio driver with a "make" then install it with "make install". If you see alot of errors when you do the make install, then you need to compile your kernel again and again until they all go away (tweaking with sound options). Strange thing about that is that I had to end up compiling the AudioPCI 97 driver and Intel i8xx driver both as modules so the nvidia driver would stop complaining about some unresolved symbol (but my buddy didn't have to), so that might help some of you hours of headache.

Also when you follow the instructions in the nVidia nForce driver install, I know it says a lot of shit about "alias blah blah" for 3 different things, and it tells you where to put them even... just an FYI, my friend and I kept putting these into that file, but it gets autogenerated, so they kept getting removed, and everything works just fine without them.

Also, don't forget that you can cd into the individual driver directories in the /nforce directory tree and type "make, make install" to individually install the drivers.

Also, the 2.4 kernel USB support seems to work just fine for me (The nForce is a OHCI device, not a UHCI device, so you only need to check the OHCI one in the kernel config), I never installed the nForce USB drivers and everything is fine (MS Natural Pro and MS IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0).

Anyway, I hope that helped you guys somewhat.

-Riyad

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## rsk

Also let me add that emerge'ing "bplay" onto you rsystem to play test sounds from the console is a good test (its a tiny tiny little sound player)

AND the big one that confused us for a while, your sound device is:

/dev/sound/dsp NOT /dev/dsp

so when you use bplay and its complaining about dsp, try:

bplay -d /dev/sound/dsp <some sound file>.wav

If I remember more, I'll post it.

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## kormac

I also ended up tossing in a supported network card to be able start from stage 1...

I didn't get any sound from bplay but KDE was happy to play sounds... so go figure  :Smile: 

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## tanksimpson

I have the MSI K7N420 Pro and I had to pop in a PCI network card to get started. I didn't have any trouble getting the nForce sound to work, but there doesn't seem to be any digital SPDIF output, and the analog just doesn't sound as good (my BA speakers have both analog and digital input). Have any of you guys gotten digital output to work?

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## rsk

The nvidia sound driver is a hacked i810 driver, its no where near as nice as the windows driver. The linux one just gets you sound, nothing else.

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## kormac

I just saw this on the MSI nForce forum.. 

I haven't played with driver level stuff a whole lot under Linux, but it looks like this was written about another distro, so some changes may need to be made... I'm sure some of this stuff can be emerged  :Smile: 

The Desktop Install guide covers some of this sound stuff (seting up Alsa under Gentoo, so give it a good read before you try this -- it should help)

I haven't tried it yet.. so your milage may vary...

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> For all of you having troubles with the i810 driver that nvidia skips in their driver-package (high latency, driver not loaded, driver needs to be loaded twice, mixer needs to be runned before driver, driver stops working after a while, etc). The solution is to use alsa instead. It can be found here: http://www.alsa-project.org
> 
> Download latest version (NOT the 0.5 version, which is very obsolete), but 0.9beta12. Its marked as beta, but is extremely stable.
> ...

 

--Kormac

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## rsk

sweet thanks! This looks good.

I have a friend that has an MSI motherboard, I better tell him about this..... oh wait   :Laughing: 

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## jay

Do you guys have the nvnet drivers running with DHCPCD ? If yes, please tell me how you got it working.

At the moment I can set up eth0 with nvnet drivers only with a static configured ip-adress. Trying dhcpcd eth0 will result in a "timeout error waiting vor a valid dhcpcd response" - I made sure that nothing is wrong with my router. When I plug a ne2k-pci NIC dhcpcd will work just perfectly.

It seems that I'm not the only one, when I checked theNvidia Linux Forum I see that others have a similiar problem.

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## jay

The latest NVIDIA nforce drivers fix the annoying DHCP problem. So head off and grab the latest sources.

Marcelo Totti anounced today the release of the 2.4.20 kernel series. Those will come with an improved nforce motherboard support , we just have to wait until it makes into the latest gentoo-sources  :Smile: 

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## rommel

anyone have an nforce2 board running under gentoo? wouldnt an ebuild for the combined drivers package be possible for this platform?

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## jay

just do: "emerge net-misc/nforce-net" and you should go. make sure you have the latest LiveCD available.

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## pjp

Moved from OTG.

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## ScubaStreb

 *rsk wrote:*   

> If you have an ASUS nForce board, the network driver is the Realtek 8139TOO (when you go to net drivers on board in kernel config, you MIGHT see 2 Realteks listed, hit the help on both of them, one of them, in the top left, says something like "REALTEK8139_TOO" or something like that, that's the one you want"). Don't install the nVidia net driver if you have an Asus, because it won't work. If you have an MSI board, or other board you know uses the nForce network card, then go ahead and install the driver (it works great).
> 
> -Riyad

 

I've read the same thing on a few different posts.  Apparently, ASUS has changed their mind and decided to use the Nvidia network driver in some of their boards.  I just bought, 02/12/03, an A7N266-VM which requires the nvnet driver for the nic.

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## modal

I have the MSI nforce board...and I've had so much fun over the past year getting everything working.

First of all, the kernel Inteli810 sucks...it has HORRIBLE sound.

You really should use the Alsa driver. (Intel8x0)  Alsa's sound is very very very much better, it's amazing.  It doesn't take much at all to get the alsa working either.  Just do a:

```
env ALSA_CARDS='intel8x0' emerge alsa-driver
```

and that will get you much better sound, just follow the gentoo alsa guide (don't mess with the one on the alsa site, it just was confusing to me)

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml

Also, the nforce IDE controller was a fun one to figure out...

It's already a part of 2.5 series of kernel, but if you want to add functionality of the ide controller to your kernel...you'll have to merge the vanilla-sources.

Then patch it with either the 2.4.21-prex patches, or the kernel2.4.20-mjc patches. (mjc has a lot of gentoo stuff in it, like evms, new vm, gentoo frambuffer logo, etc...check it out.) 

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mjc/

after than, use hdparm to set your ide controller up. i use the options:

```
hdparm -d1 -X69 -c1 A1 -m16 -u1 -a64
```

  the X69 tag is for ATA100, and the others are for ultradma, and other performance enhancements.

btw...

after you install alsa drivers, you need to unload your kernel audio drivers...you'll get some nasty irq errors if you don't.  and if you have any symlink errors when insmoding the alsa modules....just reboot (after setting up the alsaserver boot script) and it will work itself out.

yeah for the pain-in-the-a$$ nforce boards!!!

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## fca

 *rommel wrote:*   

> anyone have an nforce2 board running under gentoo? wouldnt an ebuild for the combined drivers package be possible for this platform?

 

I have an ASUS A7N8X (nforce2) board running under Gentoo, though I use a 3Com network card and an Audigy soundcard, so I don't know about the problems with sound or network. However, to use DMA, I had to use kernel 2.4.21-pre4-ac4, which has no pre-empt, which is a bit of a down-fall.

edit: never mind, I didn't see the all-A7N8X thread   :Embarassed: 

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## StuRReaL

Does anyone have a fully functional linux install with an nforce chipset? i've got my ati drivers working they work well  :Smile:  but my problem is sound like everyone elses  :Sad: 

I've followed the setup guide for ALSA and i've installed the gnome alsa mixer, but i can't get my SPDIF working  :Sad:  and unfortunatly i can only use this  for sound  :Sad:  does anyone know how to get the spdif working?

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## broeisi

I have the ASUS A7N8X-VM motherboard with NFORCE2 chipset.

And everything works well.

Even the NVIDIA nforce-net ehternet driver and sound.

Sound works perfectly.

The only problem is that  the sound doesn;t work yet with alsa-driver-0.9.8.

Today I tried that version but it broke everything.

Alsa-driver-0.9.2 works perfectly though.

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## DooBeDooBeDo

I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe GD working very well (but with no ACPI or APIC - they cause lockups).

Kernel 2.6 test10 mm1

I'm using the onboard 3com NIC, although the latest test kernels have a GPL driver for the nforce NIC, but I haven't tried that yet...

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## broeisi

My ASUS mobo locks up too if I add APIC or ACPI.

Ins't there a work aorund for this problem?

Without ACPI my pc won'tt poweroff when I issue the shutdown command.

I must always turn the power down manually when it's finished stopping all services that were running.

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## Wedge_

I have an A7N8X Deluxe that works fine with ACPI enabled as long as I use "pci=noacpi" on the kernel command line.

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## broeisi

Unfortunately even pci=noacpi on the kernel line didn't work for me.

It keeps locking my pc.

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## jay

 *broeisi wrote:*   

> My ASUS mobo locks up too if I add APIC or ACPI.
> 
> Ins't there a work aorund for this problem?
> 
> .

 

Give APM a try instead.

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## discostu

I see a lot of you have the A7N8X Deluxe with nforce2 chipset. Would someone please give a step by step howto. I can play mp3s in xmms fine, but when I try to do a mpg123 or when I play ut2003 there is no sound because there is no /dev/dsp nor /dev/sound/dsp.

Thanks  :Smile: 

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## StuRReaL

Yeah a step by step in the FAQ section i think is the way forwards, that covers everything nforce  :Smile: 

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