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Date:      Sat, 02 Mar 2002 13:16:25 -0500
From:      Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com>
To:        Roman Neuhauser <neuhauser@mobil.cz>, freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: hardware notes (mobo recommendations?)
Message-ID:  <5.1.0.14.0.20020302130333.04d20ba8@pop-server.nyc.rr.com>
In-Reply-To: <20020302180752.GD351@roman.mobil.cz>
References:  <5.1.0.14.0.20020302122356.04d20e70@pop-server.nyc.rr.com> <20020302172803.GB351@roman.mobil.cz> <5.1.0.14.0.20020302122356.04d20e70@pop-server.nyc.rr.com>

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At 19:07 2002/03/02 +0100, Roman Neuhauser wrote:
> > Date: Sat, 02 Mar 2002 12:33:41 -0500
> >
> > From: Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com>
> > Subject: Re: hardware notes (mobo recommendations?)
> >
> > At 18:28 2002/03/02 +0100, Roman Neuhauser wrote:
> >
> > >Ok, end of rant. My motherboard just went south, and I'm looking for a
> > >good mobo for a Duron CPU. Recommendations?
> >
> >
> > Just that the ASUS A7A266 has troubles with X.  (IIRC, when I first
> > realized it might be the board and not the card, when I searched, this was
> > known about in Release 4.3---haven't done an update in a few weeks, but as
> > of early Feb. the problem still existed)
>
>     Could you expand a bit on this? What problems did you have?

When I first installed FreeBSD on the box (4.2 IIRC) never got X working 
better than something 300x120.  Went back to FreeBSD around 4.4 and still 
never did get X working well on the box.  At the time, I thought it was due 
to having a Voodoo5 card.  Research indicated that some people had it 
working right out of the box, using the Voodoo3 driver but that there were 
various things to try---I don't remember them all now, but last time I did 
a search for Voodoo5 FreeBSD Xfree86 my posts to this list were among the 
first to come up, where I detailed the steps I had taken.
In Xfree 3.x I could get 600x400, I believe, possibly even 800x600, but 
that was the best it would do.  This was only in FreeBSD--in MS and various 
flavors of Linux, there was no problem
I gave up and downgraded to a Matrox G200.  Xfree 3.x would give me 
somewhat poor quality at 1024 x 768, but Xfree 4.x didn't work.  Trying 
various things such as
(argh, I forget the exact command syntax now, but something like XFree86 
-config--at the time, the syntax was correct) would result in the machine 
spontaneously rebooting with no warning and no entries in the Xfree log 
file--same result when I would do startx.
At this point, began suspecting the MB as this card not only worked fine 
with MS and Linux but also with Solaris (which hadn't worked right with the 
Voodoo5).  Did some more deja searching, this time putting in the MB and 
found that others had had similar problems back in 4.3 and, IIRC, it was 
being considered a bug.  At that point, I gave up.  Upgraded to 4.5 (did a 
fresh install, as for BSD this is simply a test box) and managed to get 
Xfree 4.2 before it was downgraded in ports--same problem.  Did another 
install after it was downgraded, and this time tried Xfree 4.1 but again, 
no joy.  I've gotten it to work adequately in X  (I don't use it very much 
as a desktop) with Xfree 3.x but not with 4.x.  At present, this will do, 
so I haven't kept up to date with it since the very beginning of 
February.  I'm not a hardware master, so there may be other factors 
involved--after seeing that others were also having trouble with the A7A266 
with no simple workarounds, I more or less gave up on it, as I have other 
boxes that work as a desktop for me.

Hope this is of some use to you
Scott Robbins




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