On Sat, 14 Mar 2015 03:30:25 -0400 Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> wrote:
Thomas Taylor composed on 2015-03-14 23:53 (UTC-0700):
Finally have to replace my motherboard after 5+ years. I have received an ASUS A88X-PLUS with an AMD A8-7600 APU unused from a friend at a good price.
Has anyone had experience with this board/apu that would be willing to pass along their experiences/tips?
I will need to get a new case due to the current desktop PC being severely damaged in a fire (not caused by the PC) so it will be several days before installing the new system. I should be able to use the existing drives or at least the backed-up drive images from an external source.
questions: 1: What must be done to boot with the new MB/APU?
Assuming the AX88-PRO and AX88-Plus have no significant hardware differences, to get to command prompts, I expect nothing more than adding 3 to Grub cmdline to keep X from trying to start will need to be done.
2: Does the OS (openSuSE 13.1-x86-64) need to be re-installed or can changes be accomplished using repair?
Enable the repo with newer gfxchip firmware, then do updates with zypper. Make sure you've gotten the firmware update before trying X.
3: Video of new apu is ATI Radeon HD-7000. Is this version natively supported or should I boot into VGA and find a driver for it?
I installed 13.1, 13.2 and Tumbleweed on an AX88-Pro for a virtually blind fellow lister in November[1]. The onboard Radeon was an unsolvable problem for VLC and SMPlayer at the time, so I put in a cheap Radeon 5450 as a simple solution that would unlikely confound the owner as updates get installed. The ATI Kaveri firmware the onboard gfxchip needs is not part of 13.1. I was able to use required firmware to get X to work in 13.1 acceptably by enabling the "Drivers and tools" repo, but not the video players.
Sound wouldn't consistently work, so I put in the PCI audio card used with his old motherboard.
[1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2014-12/msg00380.html
Thanks for the reply and information. The only difference between the PRO and PLUS versions of the M/B appear to be minor so your ideas should apply readily to my situation. Did you attempt to obtain Linux drivers for the APU? I wonder if installing that file would have allowed VLC and SMSPlayer to work. Not a problem for me as I rarely use those programs. Thanks again. Tom -- Forgiveness is really not about someone’s harmful behavior; it’s about our own relationship with our past. When we begin the work of forgiveness, it is primarily a practice for ourselves. - Gina Sharpe, “The Power of Forgiveness ^^ --... ...-- / -.- --. --... -.-. ..-. -.-. ^^^^ Tom Taylor KG7CFC openSUSE 13.1 (64-bit), Kernel 3.11.6-4-default, KDE 4.11.2, AMD Phenom X4 955, GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Nvidia 337.19) 16GB RAM -- 3x1.5TB sata2 -- 128GB-SSD FF 27.0, claws-mail 3.10.0 registered linux user 263467 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org