GIGABYTE GA-M57SLI-S4 AM2 Motherboard

[sdogg1m]

Found this motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-M57SLI-S4 AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX) over at Newegg's website and was quite impressed with its scalability. However, is the board compatible with LinuxMCE?

[Amathus]

Good  question - I also purchased same mbd - very impressive - but I  am having a horrible time - it appears there is NO driver support for this mbd - when trying to install (from CD or DVD in both 32 and 64 bit) it seeks the FDD and there is remains - nothing else happens. I posted two queries in installation issues and bug reports but to date there has been no super hero out there who can help me. Which kind 'o sux. I am in marketing and at the top of my game - Linux MCE appears brilliant  but from a commercial standpoint it needs some  PR work and we need to band together to  nail this...  and in turn break a few Windows - pun intended.

Anyway, that's my gripe - so you and I are in the same boat buddy - lets keep in touch.

Cheers from an Aussie.

[dmfrey]

I ran into this same issue on another board.  You have to disable the floppy controller in your bios.  That gets you past the issue.

It does seem to be a larger issue with supporting the nVidia chipset.  I purchased the ASUS M3N78 PRO AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 8300 HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard from newegg.  When I tried to load linuxMCE all attempts failed.  I believe that SATA is a big issue with linux, especially SATA CD/DVD drives.  The drive routinely fails to be found.  I had to remove both the SATA HD and DVD burner in order to get any distro to load with this board. (Eventually had to go back to Mythbuntu 8.10 because linuxmce 32 and 64 each could not load).

Back to the nVidia Chipset...lspci shows a lot of nvidia components, that are all unrecognized.  Onboard network and audio controllers would not work, I had to drop in a card to get ethernet.  The HDMI worked out of the box with the nv driver, but due to extremely poor quality on my HDTV, I have to use the proprietary video driver.  This fails outright when installed.  I had to drop in an older nvidia 6200 card.  I imagine you were seeing similar unknown devices on your nvida chipset as well.

Maybe I was missing something, but I was just expecting these components to work.