ASUS M3A78-EM - Great for a Core, Great for an MD - Realtek 8168 Gigabit Solved!

[jimmejames]

I have this board as well and can confirm that Seth's method works.  Something I found, however, was after making the mistake of letting the system boot to the AV Wizard on the first boot without making the NIC changes.  I completed the AV Wizard and house setup and then rebooted the system to change the NIC.  LMCE would not accept the new NIC and after about 30 min of fighting with it, I just reinstalled with the DVD (if I had opted to go straight to this option, probably would have saved me 10 min  (30-20=10)).  DVD installs are great....

At any rate, if you didn't do this, I would start there.  TO CLARIFY:  after the DVD installation, there will be the black screen with the blue lettering prompting you to remove the install media before hitting enter.  Do this and allow the system to restart.  Now, when the GRUB menu loads, there are 3 seconds??  to press ESC and make the modifications Seth mentioned.

[slow_learner]

I'll give it a rip tonight, and post my experience . I definitely don't want to go down the road of trying to upgrade the kernel to fix this.  Thats over my pay-grade these days.

shane

[slow_learner]

dear masters of the universe,
still striking out on getting my m3n78-em boards nic chipset to work with lmce.  i tried the latest suggestion which was to reinstall the i386 dvd and, post install, go straight to recovery mode and run the entries to add the r8168 module to the system and reboot.  tried that route and failed again.

here's my setup

mobo: asus m3n78-em
cpu: amd phenom 8750 64 bit quad 4
memory : 8 gigs ddr2 1066
2 sata3 hard drives, one for op system, one for media
6000 series nvidia pci card
hauppage pvr150
2 lite-on litescribe dvd r/rw

things to note on install:
- probing the bios portion of install takes a long time, result is some kind of failure but text on screen says this issue is harmless.
- i do not get to final screen post install that tells you to remove disk and reboot.  install freezes at point where there is a flashing cursor at top left of screen, but nothing else, cannot eject disk.  had to restart pc to get disk out.  when letting it load normally however, it does reach the avwizard and i can set up the pc.
- in watching the system boot in recovery mode, when it says "mounting local filesystems" displays a red [fail] result.  this however does not stop the system from booting.
- also get message that apparmor failed to boot properly.

from there i can run through the avwizard and through the initial setup. but without an internet connection its not work it.  without the onboard nic working i can't use this setup as a core/hybrid, which was the intention all along. 

If anyone has any ideas as to what to try next, please let me know.  I've been stuck here for 3 weeks now and am about to dump the board and try another one.  i don't want to b/c the capability of this board is big, i think.

thanks in advance for any tips,

Shane

[greenhornet]

Is anyone successfully using the onboard video with this mobo?

I went out and bought this board.  I built a diskless MD with it.  I can confirm that Seth's fix for the Realtek drivers did in fact work.

However, I can not get the onboard video to stay up for more that 5 minutes.  It is, after all an ATI chipset.  This is somewhat disappointing.  I would prefer to not have to go buy additional hardware.  Any suggestions?  If not, what cards are you guys using?

[greenhornet]

bump

[jimmejames]

I have an n-vidia 8500 gt- it's fanless but my core is currently very well ventilated  (don't think either of the sides are currently attached).  I tried the onboard for 1 install I think before the 710 was officially released and nothing since.

[UNi]

For anyone who's got this board running successfully, do you see these messages in your syslog / messages?

"rtc: lost some interrupts at 1024Hz"

** They seem to be harmless, but annoying for sure.

-UNi

[jimmejames]

Well,  810 is amazing- great job devs.

The onboard ATI Radeon HD 3200 works out of the box.  I ran through the installation as described here:  http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/LinuxMCE-0810_alpha2- really just installed kubuntu 810, ran aptitude update and aptitude dist-upgrade.  After the reboot I activated the only listed ATI drivers and proceeded to install LMCE 810- the latest alpha.

I'm exporting the video to a 52" rear projection Panasonic tv via a DVI port.  This tv's manual specifically says that the DVI is not for connecting a tv.  I have a refresh rate issue trying to use UI2 with overlay.  I think this is because the tv only displays a picture at 65Hz- maybe with a different tv the overlay would work.  With UI2 and no overlay the UI is very responsive- like I experienced with 710 and an 8500GT.

I'm in the process of converting over the whole house and will try to update as I experience.

BTW- I'm using the 32bit version, M3A78-EM, 4gb of ram, and a AMD AM2+ 4000 cpu.

I had trouble with a busy box error when trying to install kubuntu with a pata hdd and cd/dvd drive on the same cable-  this question was asked in another threat.  I didn't play with it at all, in instead connected a sata optical drive and used that to install.  Probably coincidence that it worked, but maybe worth noting for anyone else that experiences this- although again, this has been discussed previously.

[nite_man]

That's great! As I know people face with problems when they try to use HD 3200 and LinuxMCE 0710. If 0810 will change that situation it'll be really good.