I was unsuccessful in getting dualhead working using only the commandline aticonfig tool, so after a bit (actually alot :) of experimenting I was able to get working with using a combination of aticonfig and the Catalyst Control Center (amdcccle) tool.

First thing I did was create an initial xorg.conf configuration file using the command below in shell, which sets up a basic dualhead configuration which can be altered using aticonfig and the Catalyst Control Center.

sudo aticonfig --initial=dual-head --overlay-type=Xv

I then rebooted (I was not always able to reload the driver by just restarting X). I then started the Catalyst Control Center by typing the following in a shell

sudo amdcccle

Its important to use sudo or else you wont be able to change the configuration. In the "Display Manager" section it is possible to setup the multi-display and specify how the screens are arranged. After you set this, reboot once again.

What should happen now is that when you restart you get the same image on both screens (mirrored/cloned). You now need to enter the GNOME Screen Resolution configuration application (which in the default Ubuntu GNOME  setup is located under System - Preferences). Here you should now be able to change the size of the desktop so that it uses the entire screenspace on both screens.

One thing to note is that I also tried the very latest (9.2) ATI FGLRX driver, using this driver I actually got 2 screens in the GNOME Screen Resolution application. They were positioned on top of each other (Mirror Screens was checked), which was  hard to see (and figure out). But you can actually click on the screens and then drag and arrange them so that they match you physical screen configuration. So you may want to try the latest driver if the one in the Ubuntu repositories does not work for you.

Below is the output from lspci -vnn

01:06.0 Multimedia video controller [0400]: Conexant Systems, Inc.
CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder [14f1:8800] (rev 05)

    Subsystem: AOPEN Inc. Device [a0a0:6f05]

    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 17

    Memory at e3000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]

    Capabilities: <access denied>

    Kernel driver in use: cx8800

    Kernel modules: cx8800

After some searching I found some information on this card on the  video4linux-list. Turns out that this card is a Leadtek Winfast 2000XP Expert OEM variant, which you can also conclude from searching for 'LR6611' in Google.

I used the information from the video4linux-list to configure the card by the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/options

options cx88xx i2c_scan=1 card=5 tuner=38

Now the card will be correctly configured when booting Ubuntu. You can also test the card without rebooting, by entering the following commands in a shell.

sudo rmmod cx8800
sudo rmmod cx88xx
sudo modprobe cx88xx
sudo modprobe cx8800

You can watch TV channels in tvtime now. When scanning for channels, do not worry about the "no signal" message, the scanner will eventually find the available channels.

S-video and video input quality has also greatly improved compared to the default cx88xx settings for this card.

Since I wrote this post 5 months ago I havn't been experiencing any issues with the EN12000EG when using it at 1200 MHz. However, 22 days ago I rebooted my EN12000EG and by mistake I forgot to set the CPU frequency to 1200 MHz, I didn't realise this until about a week ago when I saw that the Gnome CPU Scaling Monitor was reporting the CPU frequency as 400 MHz (ondemand governor). For this period of 22 days I've been using the server as I normally would, which 5 months ago would freeze the system within a week when using CPU scaling.

My best guess to why this is happening is probably a change in the Linux kernel which either fixed or got around this issue. The kernel I'm currently using is Linux 2.6.24-21-generic i686 GNU/Linux on Ubuntu 8.04 with all updates installed.

You might also want to check the lastest comments, as Sam33 is reporting freezes on Debian Etchnhalf, which he suspects are related to the PATA driver.

Original Post

Little over a month ago I bought and built myself a Mini-ITX computer to use as a headless print/file/media/etc. server. For the motherboard I got a VIA EPIA EN12000EG with a 1200 MHz CPU, because it was passively cooled. I put it inside a Morex 3688 chassis without using the chassis fan. After using it for a while, the system would "randomly" freeze completely. This would typically happend when I "stressed" system, eg. transfering files, printing and using VNC at the same time. There was no rise in CPU temperature when this happend, so I didn't think it was because the motherboard wasn't properly cooled without any fans running.

The longest uptime I had until this point was about 6 days, but the computer would often just freeze after a few days use.

So I thought it might be an I/O problem and I therefor updated the 1.07 BIOS to version 1.09, but the only thing I could tell changed was the CPU temperature was now reported as being around 20 °C instead around 45 °C previously with the 1.07 BIOS. Since this didn't resolve the system freezes either, I then tried to update to Ubuntu 8.04 beta, hoping the issue might have been resolved in the new version, however the system would still freeze on me.

I had a problem with evolution-data-server using 90% of the CPU in Ubuntu 8.04, this is a known bug. I resolved it by just uninstalling evolution-data-server, as I don't use Evolution.

sudo apt-get remove evolution-data-server

I had earlier found this "EN12000EG Freeze" thread at the VIA forums (registration required), where alot of different solutions had been suggested, I tried some of the easy ones like changing the BIOS settings, but that still didn't resolve the problem. So I thought I'd try disabling CPU frequency scaling as suggested by rararasputin and this solution has worked for me so far.

First I disabled powernowd by in System -> Administration -> Services. However the cpu scaling software cpufreq is active and uses the On demand CPU scaling governor by default. There are few different ways to change this to the Performance governor, which will keep the CPU at 1200 Mhz. One way is to use the cpufreq-selector in a console like shown below

sudo cpufreq-selector -g performance

Another option, if you are using the Gnome CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Applet, is that you can select the governor you wish to use using this applet. But first you need to enable user CPU scaling by the following command and answering yes to setting the suid for cpufreq-selector.

dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

Now you can left-click on the applet and choose Performance.

A thing to note is that this setting reverts to the default On demand when you reboot your system. I read that you can make it permanent by changing the policy_ac key to Performance in apps -> gnome-power-manager -> cpufreq using gconf-editor, however this doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe because I use the force=acpi kernel option in /boot/grub/menu.lst and this somehow overrides the setting. If any one knows of a simple solution, please let me know :-)

As you can see from the partial screenshot below, my VIA EN12000EG based server ran for over 11 days before Ubuntu insisted that I reboot due to an update. In the 11 days I had tried to stress the system several times, for instance transfering files while updating Ubuntu over VNC and playing internet radio. Which would often freeze the system earlier, but after disabling cpu scaling, I've been unable to freeze the system.

My conclusion is that the VIA EN12000EG hardware has buggy CPU scaling support.

As a side note, I couldn't get s-video output working with any other driver than the binary CN700 Unichrome Pro Driver. Otherwise everything else worked out of the box with both Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04.

Update:

rararasputin posted his Openchrome xorg.conf with s-video support in the comments. Download formatted here.

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.