Ubuntu 7.10 and Nvidia nForce 630i
I recently upgraded my computer and got a Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H motherboard, not knowing that Ubuntu 7.10 did not support the included Nvidia nForce 630i chipset out of the box. I just moved my hard drives with Ubuntu 7.10 already installed from my old computer into my new and it turned out that neither the integrated Nvidia GeForce 7100 (I already had an Nvidia driver installed) nor the sound card was automatically detected.
To get the GeForce 7100 working I downloaded Envy and then manually selected the Nvidia 169.09 driver, which was then downloaded and installed. I used nvidia-settings to configure the graphics card.
The sound card (HDA Intel driver) is not supported by the version of ALSA included with Ubuntu 7.10, it is however supported by the latest ALSA version. So in order to get it working I had to download, compile and install the lastest ALSA driver myself, there is a guide available here which describes the process.
The network adapter works out of the box, it uses the forcedeth driver.
My new system would freeze on me after a few hours of use, I suspected the Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H motherboard was to blame for this. After checking the Gigabyte website for my motherboard, I saw there was a F5 BIOS update to my F2 version BIOS. Since I use Ubuntu, I couldn't use their @BIOS Windows utility for updating the BIOS, so I had to use the BIOS built-in Q-Flash which supports updating from an USB stick.
First I downloaded the BIOS update and used Wine to extract the update file from the .EXE update available. When I then first tried to put the update file on my USB memory stick and used Q-Flash I got an BIOS ID checker error. This error is apparently related to the file system used on the memory stick, since after I formated my memory stick to FAT-16 with mkfs.vfat -F 16 /dev/sdc1 (my memory stick shows up at /dev/sdc1, used df to see where your memory stick is located) I was able to update my BIOS successfully, and I havn't experienced any freezes since.
February 24th, 2008 - 14:54
Hi,
I just bought the GA-73PVM-S2H and trying to get the sound working.
I followed the instructions on how to update the ALSA.
When I come to the part of finding out which model of sound card I use I get an error, the file does not exist.
anders@anders-desktop:~$ cat /proc/asound/card0/codec\#*
cat: /proc/asound/card0/codec#*: Filen eller katalogen finns inte
Do you know what I have done wrong?
Thanks!!
February 24th, 2008 - 15:14
Hi Anders,
I didn’t follow the “Manually Specify Module Parameters” part of the guide, I just compiled and installed the latest ALSA drivers and it worked after I rebooted.
February 28th, 2008 - 09:11
To get the GeFroce 7100 working I downloaded Envy and then manually selected the Nvidia 169.09 driver.
- I downloaded Envy but only see 169.12 driver. I assume that is a superset of 169.09.
What do you think?
February 28th, 2008 - 09:29
I think you are probably right about it being a superset, so I’d definitely try it.
March 4th, 2008 - 08:40
When you updated your BIOS did you notice that the CPU fan started running on a much higher rate?
March 4th, 2008 - 08:48
Morgan: I have the “stock” Intel CPU fan for my 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo and I havn’t noticed it getting being louder after the update.
Have you tried the “Load optimized defaults” option in the BIOS? They suggest you do this after you update your BIOS on the Gigabyte website. Maybe this will load more correct settings for your setup.
March 4th, 2008 - 18:35
Morgan, I also updated my BIOS and the CPU fan ran at max. I couldn’t find a way of slowing it so I reverted to an older BIOS. Did you manange to solve it?
March 15th, 2008 - 00:52
Thanks for the summary and information, I’m currently doing exactly the same as you (swapped the motherboard of a working system).
Everything went smoothly except being on 6.10 forcedeth.c does not work. However booting from 7.10 livecd forcedeth 0.60 works fine as you have stated.
I’m about to delve into some chroot trickery.
March 19th, 2008 - 06:47
I’m considering the same mobo for my mythbuntu box. Would anyone know if the 7100/630i chipset provides any decent acceleration – supported in linux – to help with decoding (mpeg2, h.264, etc)? I’m hoping e2200 cpu or lower is enough.
(sorry for posting this here, but since I cannot find much info elsewhere, I thought I’d ask the gurus who have this mb fully working)
March 19th, 2008 - 09:23
Hey Marty,
From what I can gather of information, I dont think there is any real video decoding support, except for Nvidia’s PureVideo (Windows only) which offloads decoding to the GPU.
http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo.html
The only reference for a similar Linux project I can find is XvMC, which currently supports MPEG2.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC
March 28th, 2008 - 06:49
If you have one of those stupid, pointless EXEs for those BIOS updates, you can use unrar to pull it apart. sudo apt-get install unrar and then “unrar e” on the executable.
And yes, 169.12 works fine.
This whole thing is pretty ridiculous to get this to work. Envy installed over a hundred packages and I think I ended up with a new kernel (that won’t survive an upgrade) out of the deal.
But I thank you for writing up your experiences. It got me running.
April 8th, 2008 - 21:36
I read this and despaired. Then I tried the Ubuntu 8.04 beta and everything ran right out of the box. It popped up a bubble asking if I wanted to enable the proprietary Nvidia driver but that was it.