We have 4 systems supported by ASUS M2V mobos with AMD2 cpus on board.  No we haven’t gotten CentOS of any flavor to work yet.  Yes, we did load Fedora Core 6 and it worked, with respect to the SATA driver only.  There is a RAID, Audio and LAN driver for Linux that comes on the M2V mobo CD. The audio driver installs and works fine on FC6.  I’ve read many of the messages with respect to setting up the LAN driver.  We’ve had the best success with the 1.0.4.x Attansic driver being provided by Jay Cliburn (kernel 2.6.18.x).  He has been very helpful with this.  He has a 2.x driver which doesn’t appear to work with the 2.6.18 kernel and we haven’t gotten any LAN driver to work with the 2.6.19 upgrade so we’ve fallen back to the FC6 2.6.18.x kernel for now.  I took someone’s advice and downloaded the bios flash app and tried that approach.  I immediately toasted the BIOS chip.  I called ASUS in Louisville, KY and they advised that I get a new BIOS chip.  The conversation seemed to indicate this was not a new phenomenon.  I ordered a new chip for each machine with their newest BIOS.  I inserted a new chip in one of the systems and fired it up.  Low and behold, the chip is not an MV2 BIOS as before, but an American Megatrends BIOS (2.45.x).  It works much better and there are more appropriate settings in the BIOS now for ACPI.  The plug and play drivers in CentOS 4.4 may work better with this BIOS as well since there are no onboard LAN settings in the BIOS setup.  I’m hoping this means I can use CentOS on these systems now.  I’ll keep you posted.

 

If you contact the http://helpdesk.asus.com and call their tech support (ext 3).  They’ll put you in touch with a gal who will ship you the new chip for 5 bucks (5 to 10 day ground).  I think it’s worth it, so far.

 

David Baker