Running Linux on a e-cube Mini Barebones system
For a relatively small amount of money (399 Euros) I bought a fancy
looking e-Cube Barebones system. The system came without processor/cooler
and IDE devices, so I had to pay a little extra to have a running system.
As soon as I came home, I wanted to install Linux on it ofcourse. After
an installation of RedHat Linux 8.0 I ran into a couple of problems.
This writing may help out people buying the same system or buying a system
with some of the same components. Hope you find this useful.
The ecube system is shipped with a CFI-S86 motherboard of Chyang Fun.
It has a Socket478B socket and includes the following components which
gave me problems:
Realtek RTL8100B
Realtek chipsets are pretty well supported in Linux kernels, but not by
my distribution. After
compiling a new kernel, I'm now using the 8139too.o module which is
working for this chipset.
S3 ProSavage8
Running the "lspci" command learned me that the S3 ProSavage8 controller
really is a ProSavageDDR chipset (at least that's how Linux is calling it).
A driver for this controller wasn't shipped with RH 8.0 so I went to
www.probo.com/timr/savage40.html
to get the savage_pro.o driver binary to replace the current savage_pro
driver in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers directory. I edited the
/etc/X11/XF86Config file by hand, but tried the same thing later with
RedHats graphical X configurator. When using an X configuration tool
just choose as graphical driver one of the Savage drivers (probably
easiest to choose the Savage Generic driver). Restart X and the
system is running with better resolution.
On the website mentioned above you'll find as well the s3switch utility
to activate your TV as another video output device. For me it's not
working yet. Don't know why.
Via8233 Audio Controller
The BIOS manual didn't give any information on this one, but luckily
enough most Linux distributions ship with tools like "lspci" (or you
could cat ofcourse /proc/bus/pci/devices). Kernels 2.4.18* don't have
support for the Via8233 controller so I went googling the Internet.
The ALSA Project (
www.alsa-project.org)
had the solution. Releases of version 0.9.0rc3 and higher did support
via8233. After a download of 0.9.0rc7 I compiled the drivers, the
libraries, the OSS support, the tools and the utils, insert the snd-via82xx
module in the kernel and tried to play a sound. Didn't work. After some
searching I found the reason: Version 0.9.0rc7 has a bug which makes the
via8233 driver initialize the soundcard in a wrong way. I tried an
older version (0.9.0rc6) and everything went fine!
Help on installing the ALSA driver can be found on the ALSA website by
going to the Soundcard Matrix and following the "details" link of the
VIA via8233 chipset. Thanks to Jaroslav Kysela.
