[linux-audio-user] Intel DG965WH motherboard

[John Anderson]

Hi y'all

My PC died very suddenly on Sunday night (moment of silence).

One can't buy Sempron processors here anymore, so yesterday I bought an
Intel DG965WH motherboard with a Core Duo E6600 and 2G of RAM. I managed
to get it up and running without too many problems using my previous
32bit installation (Gentoo). There were however a couple of non-critical
gotchas:

- The PATA IDE controller on the board is a Marvell which isn't
explicitly supported by even 2.6.18. Apparently there are efforts
underway by the kernel developers to get the docs. Anyway, I was lucky
that my OS lives on a SCSI drive so it booted OK. Eventually I found out
that adding boot parameters "all-generic-ide irqpoll" to the kernel lets
it see the IDE drive where all my sound files are. hdparm says I'm
getting 45 - 50 MB/sec so that should be fine.

- There's only one PATA connection. Which is fine for 1x cd and 1x hard
drive, except with my Antec case which has the cd and the hd very far
apart :-(

- I'm sure you've noticed by now that Intel made much PR mileage of the
open source drivers for the onboard video adapters for these boards.
Which is wonderful and all, except that right now the agpgart isn't
supported in 2.6.18, and the xorg driver is in 7.1. Which is currently
masked by Gentoo, and a PITA to unmask because xorg is in zillions of
itty bitty modules. I don't know about xorg-7.1 availability in other
distros. The sources for the up-to-date agpgart and so on are available
on Intel's website (intellinuxgraphics.org) but I met a nice black
screen when I tried them and I didn't feel like fighting with it
anymore. So for now I'm using the vesa driver which actually works OK -
very little redrawing lag when I switch desktops and so on.

- I disabled the onboard soundcard and the ICE1712 is working fine so
far with jack at -p64 -n2, 2.6.18 with Ingo's patches. I haven't given
it any serious work to do so far though. The sound card is on a shared
interrupt with the SCSI controller (Adaptec 29160) and several USB
controllers. Which was a recipe for xruns on my previous board.

- And of course since the machine is still using a 32 bit installation,
so there's only 1 processor :-|

bye
John