Linux on the AOpen AK79G MAX Motherboard

Introduction
The Hardware
Installation
Kernel matters
What won't work yet?
Conclusions

Introduction

This doc is intended to be a sort of mini HOWTO for the AOpen AK79G MAX motherboard, since I can find no other similar site.
It was first composed on the 29th June 2003 and has been updated a couple of times. Most recently on 20030208.

The Hardware

The motherboard itself is composed of a black multilayered PCB, with 5 PCI slots and myriad headers. (If you used all of the expansion plates included you probably couldn't fit anything else in your PC). It is marketed as an 'integrated solution', and as such it comes complete with rather a lot of onboard hardware. From the top, we have:

NVidia nForce2 IGP [Crush 18G] + MCP-T Chipset (aka nForce2 Ultra 400)
- 8x AGP slot
- 5xPCI
- 1xACR
- ATA 133 Controller (3 parallel ATA headers)
- NVidia NIC
- NForce Soundstorm 5.1 sound (with SP/DIF in/out, and front panel connectors.)
- 3 DDR DIMM slots (up to DDR400)
- GeForce4 MX Graphics with TV out.
- 6xUSB 2 Sockets
- 2xIEE1394
- Normal legacy ports: printer, serial, ps/2 mouse/keyboard etc.)
Promise Serial ATA
DieHard Bios (2 EEPROM chips)

See ( http://www.aopen.nl/products/mb/ak79gmax.htm) for more information. Also, don't forget to get new BIOS code regularly. Version 1.0, which the board shipped with, was, quite frankly, crap.

Installation

Since I was upgrading my debian sid machine (new mobo, RAM, CPU), I just used my original setup. The kernel booted with no problem (with Generic IDE support), and allowed me to rebuild a new kernel tailored to this board. At first I used the fnk patchset (from http://cipherfunk.org) for 2.4.20, but then I managed to make 2.4.23 boot, and run without randomly crashing, and now I use 2.6, and haven't had any problems at all. Here's what to do:

Build a kernel including everything you reckon you'll need (here's my .config - current for 2.6.2).
Either switch off APIC and IO-APIC, or boot with the noapic option, as below.
Remember to set up high memory support in the kernel if you get more than 1024MB of RAM.
Boot the kernel with the command line (here's my grub one):
- /vmlinux-2.6.2 root=/dev/hda5 pci-noacpi noapic nlapic ro
Make sure you enable udma4 on all your hard drives, use the command:
- hadpam -Xudma5 -d1 - /dev/hda
The best way of doing this is to tweak /etc/hdparm.conf.

To get X going, you'll need the NVidia GLX installer which builds the glue between the binary driver and the kernel, and install GLX drivers etc. (The LKM taints the kernel), I upgraded to a GeForce FX 5600 Ultra since the image quality with the internal graphics is not great, and it's a bit slow. My machine required no more setting up to get the new NVidia card to work - a tribute to their unified driver architecture. Note, 2.6 is now (Feb 2004) supported OOTB in NVidia's installer.

For sound, I would recommend using the latest ALSA modules, just download, compile and install (or build as modules in 2.6). They're excellent, although I'm not too sure how to set up spdif on the built in sound as yet.

To get the NIC going, use the Forcedeth reverse engineered drivers, which are now in Linux 2.6.

What wont work yet?

Well, a few things, but nowhere near as much as two months ago.

I haven't tried the NVidia SMB yet, but I've read that it works in 2.6.
The IEE1394 is rumoured not to work. It is detected fine for me, but I don't have anything to test it with.
Last time I checked, SATA was rubbish. I started off buying a SATA drive, and after a couple of months of annoying random crashes, bought a PATA one - this situation might have improved by now (Dec 2005), but I'm not planning on finding out yet.

Conclusions

This board is fast and cool, and mostly everything works with a bit of tweaking (which is always fun). I wasn't hugely impressed by the integrated graphics, but the sound is fine. One of the first things you should do is flash the BIOS: improvements are pretty constant, and going from 1.00 - 1.03 increased stability a lot. Do not get PNY memory for this board, since it doesn't work.