Hi All,
This is just a brief writeup on my experience with installing Linux on the Intel DG965RY motherboard.
Hardware -------- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @2.4GHz Intel DG965RY Motherboard 1 GB DDR2-533 RAM 250GB SATA HDD PATA Emprex DVD+-RW
Software i386 ------------- Suse 10.1 Suse 10.2 Debian Sarge Knoppix 5.1.1 Fedora Core 6 Mandriva
Software x86_64 --------------- Suse 10.1 x86_64 Debian Etch AMD64 Fedora Core 6 x86_64
CDROM detection --------------- Out of all the software mentioned above, NONE of them except for Fedora Core 6 even proceeded further than the CDROM detection stage. The DG965RY board uses the Marvell PATA chipset which is not supported by the linux at the moment (though there are some patches available in the kernel tree). All the distros would boot and then fail to detect a valid installation disk in the drive. The solution on google is to add the "all-generic-ide" option while booting. It didn't work for any of the distros. Only the Fedora distros would actually proceed beyond the CDROM detection phase and start the installation procedure. The complete option set recommended for this board is "all-generic-ide irqpoll pci=nommconf".
Installation ------------ Having a dual core system, I obviously wanted to use virtualization so I opted for the virtualization package while customizing my install. The install proceeded normally and within 30-40 mins I had an installed Fedora Core 6 system with Xen virtualization. Unfortunately it was horribly unstable. Being a new system, I didn't know if the issue was with my hardware or software so I reinstalled Fedora (both i386 and x86_64) multiple times with various combinations of bios settings, installation options, etc. Nothing worked. The system would lock and crash within 10 mins of use.
Yesterday I installed a bare minimum Fedora Core 6 x86_64 option again with no virtualization. Lo and behold, it worked beautifully. No crashes, very stable with the 2.6.18 kernel.
Booting ------- The install doesn't add the full option line to the kernel in the grub menu.lst. It just adds the pci=nommconf option. The line has to be manually edited in the menu.lst file.
Browsing -------- Browsing, of course, doesn't work out of the box since it enables IPV6 by default. Disabling IPV6 worked and I could browse the net.
Updates ------- The default yum repository configured is from download.fedora.redhat.com which is so slow that yum timeouts trying to retrieve repomd.xml. Same with the default configured mirrorlist. The option was to create a local mirror list with mirrors added manually from Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc. This worked and a "yum update" updated 300 packages by downloading 421 MB from the mirrors. (1 night's work with the DSLNU plan from MTNL)
Open Issue ---------- Even though I have added "irqpoll" in the kernel option, the boot message says that IRQ #19 not working or something and that I should use the irqpoll option !!! Haven't yet checked this on google. Any inputs will be welcome.
Summary ------- I now have a working Fedora system with the 2.6.19 kernel and updated packages. It is still barebones and I have to install all the productivity and development software but now I don't anticipate any difficulties. I have not added my printer/scanner/camera, etc. I'll try and update this when I do so.
Hope this helps others using this board.
Regards, Rajesh