Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 11:35:23AM -0500, Grok Mogger wrote:
Hey everyone,
I'm looking into building a new machine. As for the
motherboard, I'm interested in an ASUS 'A8V-VM SE'.
Unfortunately, in Googling I've seen people complain about
problems with the board's southbridge. It's a 'VIA VT8237A'.
I went to kernel.org and started looking through the change logs
wondering if perhaps I'd be able to find something about support
being added to the kernel for this chipset. Lo and behold, I did!
I searched this changelog...
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.19
And found the following two snippets that seem to indicate that
there is support in the kernel for this southbridge as of the
2.6.19 kernel.
[... snipped data on VIA chipsets]
Unfortunately, Debian uses the 2.6.18 kernel. I'm somewhat lost
from here. Does anyone have any advice for me?
compile a 2.6.19 kernel. okay, I know its not that simple, but its not
that hard either. the trick is getting the kernel compiled on a
machine that won't boot...
Even if I can add support for my Southbridge somehow, if the
default Debian kernels don't include support for my Southbridge,
then I won't be able to install Debian, right? Because the
installer won't be able to write to my SATA hard disk.
if there truly is no support, then you are correct, but there is more
than 1 way to install debian. You *could* use a live-cd with more
recent kernels (latest Knoppix, Ubuntu, etc) that can properly see the
sata disk. Then use debootstrap to install from that live-cd
environment followed up by chrooting into the new install, downloading
debian kernel building packages, downloading source for 2.6.19 and
building the kernel inside the chroot. Might work. If you're dead set
on debian that's a way to do it. And you could move yourself up to
sid, watch for debian kernel support for your chipsets to hit, switch
to a debian kernel, reset your apt sources and drift your way into
testing and ultimately end up with a lenny install. Long process but
it would be a fun ride.
A
Hey Andrew,
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply to my post. =)
Thanks for the advice. I have to admit, sounds a little scary
for someone who has never compiled a kernel before. =\ But I
may actually try it.
What about security updates though (and just bug fixes for that
matter) if I've compiled my own kernel? Basically what you're
saying is that I won't have a Debian kernel, I'll just have a
kernel built from the sources off kernel.org. Right? So I
guess to stay up-to-date, I'd just need to try and keep up with
the latest stable release from kernel.org?
Also, I have to say this whole problem I've stumbled on to seems
kind of silly to me in a way. I love Debian's approach to
stability and security, but why not at least keep adding
hardware support to the kernel as it becomes available? Seems
like it would make a lot of sense to at least just keep adding
drivers even if the rest of the kernel remains frozen at 2.6.18
or whatever.
Finally, I liked the changelogs on kernel.org a lot. Is there
anything like that for the Debian kernels? I've looked around
but haven't found anything.
Thanks,
- GM
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