I purchased a Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2 motherboard for use as a media director, it uses the nvidia 7050 chipset and so i thought it would be relatively good for linuxmce.
However i cant get the thing to boot beyond dhcp_config. I do think i know what the problem is. I noticed that the mac address for eth0 would change during the boot process and an error message generated saying "Invalid Mac Address.... switching to a random mac. Please complain to your board manufacturer".
After digging around on the web I found this:
"The nvidia MAC has for many years now for some stupid reason had it's
MAC address stored in reverse order on almost all boards that use it
(not sure if the documentation was confusing or what). As a result the
driver has had to reverse it before using it. A few months ago some
board makers decided to "fix" the problem and start storing the MAC in
the correct order which of course now breaks all existing drivers that
"know" the MAC address is in reverse order."
I also found a couple of ideas for fixes including editing /etc/network/interfaces (
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/501 ) and also making changes to etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rule (
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/145382 ) but so far no joy, linuxmce still fails to boot.
Anyway perhaps someone here has encountered a similar issue. Is this something we are going to have to watch out for when purchasing motherboard or am i missing a simple fix / workaround for linuxmce ?
Thanks
Andy
