On Sunday 04 November 2001 16:40, David A. Riggs wrote:

I'm the not-so-proud owner of an Abit KT7A-RAID. It has plauged me since the day I purchased it with instability and poor disk IO performance. It uses the Via KT133A chipset, which guarantees you many headaches if you plan to use an SBLive with it. Both Via and Creative admit that a problem exists between them, but neither company accepts responsibility. Search groups.google.com for kt7a and sblive if you don't trust my advice alone.

There is an excellent KT7 FAQ at: http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm

And a KG7 FAQ here (I know nothing about the KG7): http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kg7kr7/kg7kr7faq.htm

I'm not sure about SuSE 7.3, but the stock 7.1 2.4.0 kernel had no support for the Via KT133A...this may be something to look into as well.

With SuSE 7.2 I had NOT been able to get my PlexStor 4832 CDRW to work properly because of the VIA NorthBridge problem. It would die at aroung 60MB at every attempt, and that was without any sound being active. All I could do with it was read CDs, not write them. Last night I did a clean install of SuSE 7.3 Pro, using the 'install almost everything' option. I was stunned. SuSE installed its standard 2.4.10-4GB modular kernel and YaST2 recognized everything correctly by autodetection: BJC-620 and the Iomega Zip250 connected on my single parallel port, monitor, wheel mouse, keyboard, NIC card, and the PlexStore CDRW. I had to make only two adjustments: the routing table to correctly connect this workstation to the firewall-dhcp box (also known as my wife's PC :), and I had to add a+rw to the permissions of the /media/cdrecorder file. I just burned a 398MB backup CD using XCD-Roast. No doubt about it. SuSE 7.3 is their finest release for clean installs. (This is after I did an experimental 'upgrade' using the 'allmost everyting' option, which turned out to be a total disaster.). Jerry

* Roger L. S. Griffiths BSc (roger.l.s.griffiths@ntlworld.com) [011104 23:01]: ->On Sunday 04 Nov 2001 10:40 pm, David A. Riggs wrote: ->> I'm the not-so-proud owner of an Abit KT7A-RAID. It has plauged me ->> since the day I purchased it with instability and poor disk IO performance. ->> It uses the Via KT133A chipset, which guarantees you many headaches ->> if you plan to use an SBLive with it. Both Via and Creative admit that a ->> problem exists between them, but neither company accepts responsibility. ->> Search groups.google.com for kt7a and sblive if you don't trust my advice ->> alone. ->Problems with the KT7A and the SBLive!???? I am using an SBLive Player 1024 ->quite happily on my system (KT7A + 1.2GHz TB). You might want to check for ->the BIOS updates as I remember seeing somewhere that one of the BIOS updates ->resolved some issues with the SBLive!. -> ->I bought my KT7A about 2months ago and am using it quite happily with an ->SBlive! without any BIOS updates. This seems to imply that the newer KT7A mbs ->have the latest BIOS (or at least a BIOS with the SBLive! fix). this issue was fixed in the 1007 version of the KT133 bios. The current revision of the bios is 1009 and it works quite well. My CPU temp went down by 10 degrees C when I updated it...nice. -----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====----- Ben Rosenberg mailto:ben@whack.org -----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====----- "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal" -AE

->Ben, did the bios come as a windows exe and did you have to run WinXX ->to install it? ->Jerry It was an .awd file and I used aflash.exe to install it. I have a Windows 98 bootdisk for just such things. :) -----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====----- Ben Rosenberg mailto:ben@whack.org -----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====----- "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal" -AE

Thank you all. Some very useful info/links... kt7a + ddr, I don't know why I thought this was an option... must've misread some page or something... :P Anyway, I think I'll go with the kg7. As far as I can tell it *should* be fine with the sb-live, has the better options for future ram-expansion, nicer features and in general gets the better comments/reviews... I still have one concern though: Am I heading for trouble with my two Matrox-cards (*and* sb-live) on the kg7? Cards are: Millenium I (2064W) and Millenium II (2164W) in a dualhead setup... I'd sorely miss dual, but at the moment I couldn't afford to go get new graphics card(s) as well. Searching for kg7-lite matrox millenium doesn't seem to turn up anything, but I'm not sure if this is because it doesn't pose a problem, or if it's just because these cards are so old that nobody's ever used them with the kg7...(?) Thanks again for the other info... I'll consider going with one of the newer processors, but, I *am* on a budget :( Jon Clausen

On Monday 05 November 2001 14:11, James Oakley wrote:

You shouldn't have any trouble with these at all.

Thank you... (it's what I wanted to hear anyhow)

On the other hand, Millenium G450s are really cheap these days and have dualhead on a single AGP card. I have one of these beasties and I'm truly happy with it.

I know, I know... but -cheap is still money, and just getting this basic stuff stretches what (little) economy I do have... :P Somebody advised against the WorldTop case, so I looked around some more... Any definite no-no's about Codegen cases? Thanks again Jon Clausen

--- Martin Webster wrote:

The KT7A is on my shortlist too (some excellent reviews). I'm still undecided on what processor (XP?) and memory though. BTW, you can only use two registered DDR DIMMs on this board.

I have a KT7A with an Athlon 1100 chip. It has performed quite well. I use W2k on it now, but I did install SuSE 7.2 for a while with no problems. Unless I overclock my 1100, I'm only running my 133 RAM at 100, but it's still a very fast computer. TYAN also makes a new $220 MP motherboard (not the $400+ server board with built in RAID). The AMD chips are so cheap that it's real hard not to consider the MP version. FWIW I've always heard spotty and troublesome things about the RAID version of this board, so beware. ===== ---- Daniel Woodard __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find a job, post your resume. http://careers.yahoo.com

On Sunday 04 November 2001 12:14 pm, Jon Clausen wrote:

...

Mainboard: Abit KT7A -or Abit,KG7-lite CPU AMD,TB 1.333/266 (Socket A) Cooler Coolermaster,DP5-6I11A Ram DDR 512MB PC2100 266MHz Case WorldTop,WTY400 Midi P3/P4 HDD Maxtor,DiamondMax Plus 60 DVD Toshiba,SD-M1502

The KT7A is on my shortlist too (some excellent reviews). I'm still undecided on what processor (XP?) and memory though. BTW, you can only use two registered DDR DIMMs on this board. DDR Memory on a KT7A? This is the board that I have and I am afraid no DDR support on this motherboard (though it does support both 200 and 266 FSB

On Sunday 04 Nov 2001 11:12 pm, Martin Webster wrote: processors). I would recommend it though as it is a very good board.

This will be my first non-Intel processor so any tips on cooling will be welcome. Check out AMD's web site (http://www.amd.com), I downloaded a PDF document from there all about cooling Athlon/Duron systems.

BTW If you are buying a new Athlon, it may be worth considering an Athlon XP as these processors run cooler (apparently). TTFN Roger -- Roger L.S. Griffiths, BSc (Hons) Gott würfelt nicht (God does not play dice) - Albert Einstein

Installation goes fine but when I try to configure the X server, the PC locks up and will only respond to a hardware reset. Subsequent reboot invokes fsck and shows damage to /dev/hdb3. Thanks, Rob

I've been installing the 7.3 Live Evaluation and it also locked up during the X Configuration. I couldn't find my monitor (Targa 19110A) in the list, but I tried VESA with various resolutions (such as 640x480). Only by not configuring X, while running the install in text mode, I managed to get through the install. After the install, I tried to configure X by using yast2, sax, sax2 and xf86config. If I remember it correctly, the computer locked up in yast2 and sax2 and in sax I wasn't able to make the right configuration. Only xf86config worked well enough to get me into X, but to get into X I still had to start SuSE in text mode and the computer still locked up when I logged out of X. To see whether it worked any better, I deleted the 7.3 Live Evaluation files on my hard disk and installed the 7.2 Live Evaluation. It worked flawlessly. I have ASUS V6600 GeForce 256 32MB SDRAM, ASUS K7M motherboard, AMD Ahtlon 650MHz (clocked at 700MHz), 256MB RAM. I hope that someone can help me with this, I'd love to get 7.3 working. Thanks, Erik Isaksson -----Original Message----- From: Scheme Loh [mailto:schemebot@yahoo.com] Sent: måndag den 5 november 2001 03:12 To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] HELP ! SuSE 7.3 won't install --- Rob Lofland wrote:

Installation goes fine but when I try to configure the X server, the PC locks up and will only respond to a hardware reset. Subsequent reboot invokes fsck and shows damage to /dev/hdb3.

What video card? It's prolly not "damage," but ext2 is sensitive to a warm reboot or having the power cut if it can't perform a proper shutdown. ie it's normal. It checks the disk and fixes any wierdness it finds. I've had these types of lock-ups configuring X server if the video card was weakly supported or similar. Try real simple video settings like 800x600 and especially 16-bit instead of 24 or 32 bit color to make sure the system itself works, then get about tweaking the video card set-up. ===== ---- Daniel Woodard __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find a job, post your resume. http://careers.yahoo.com -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq and the archives at http://lists.suse.com