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Ask Slashdot: Linux-Friendly Motherboard Manufacturers?
dotancohen writes "I am tasked with building a few Linux machines for a small office. However, many the currently available motherboards seem to be Linux-hostile. For instance, in addition to the whole UEFI issue, my last install was a three-day affair due to the motherboard reporting a Linux-supported ethernet device (the common RTL8168) while it was actually using a GbE Ethernet device that does not work with the legacy drivers and didn't even work with a test Windows 7 install until the driver disk was installed. There are no current hardware compatibility lists for Debian or Ubuntu and I've received from Asus and Gigabyte the expected reply: No official Linux support, install Windows for best experience. I even turned to the two large local computer vendors, asking if they could provide Linux-compatible machines ready to go, but neither of them would be of any help. What globally-available motherboards or motherboard manufacturers can you recommend today?"
I heard the Raspberry Pi is very Linux compatible, in fact it doesn't even run Windows.
This space for rent.
Aren't just plain Intel boards, with Intel NICs and Intel HD graphics supposed to be 'out of the box' open source friendly?
I have heard good things about system 76
Isn't the software suppose to support the hardware?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
If Microsoft demands it, motherboard makers will fall in line in order to stay in business.
This probably also signals the beginning of the end of Microsoft.
Mighty empires always fall.
I have yet to try a motherboard which is not Linux-friendly in recent years. Every single server board I have ever tried has worked flawlessly. Every true hardware RAID controller (be it integrated or PCI-X, PCI-E, or PCI) has been supported natively, and software/hybrid/fakeraid controllers have always been supported in JBOD mode. Integrated Intel or Matrox video works fine.
Workstation/desktop boards? Aside from bluetooth, wifi, or weird video chipsets, they are supported fine. Ethernet ports used to require some tweaking (especially for Marvell controllers) but even those enjoy good support. If you want a good, fast board check out the GA-Z77X-UD5H-WB
As far as UEFI is concerned - if you run 32-bit RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux, you won't be able to boot the 32-bit disc with UEFI enabled, but why would you forgo the flat memory space of a 64-bit board now that RAM is dirt cheap? Boot 64-bit disc and it works just fine. I have UEFI enabed on my GA-Z77X-UD5H-WB and it is fully supported out of the box by OpenSUSE and both Centos and RHEL 6.3. It's more work to get full support in Linux, actually, because the Linux install Just Works(TM). To boot Windows 7, I had to make a Windows 7 USB key. It booted 64-bit Linux just fine.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
...whether a motherboard is Linux friendly on Slashdot, I would put down your hammer and step away from the computer you are trying to build.
It's all about chipsets. Figure out what chipset a given motherboard has, do a few googles, and you'll likely have your answers.
I have no problem with either of the manufacturers that you mentioned. Were you perhaps trying to do an AMD solution? I'd just stick with Intel chips and chipsets at this point in the game.
Find a few candidates based on your desired CPU, reviews, and other features. Then check their reviews on Newegg.
http://www.newegg.com/Motherboards/Category/ID-20
Buy per built workstations from eBay. Dell precision usually works out well
Supermicro is a good option.
System76.com have already done the research for you.
Or, more general vendors such as Dell, super micro, IBM, etc. all sell Linux specific models.
I just built an HTPC and this is what I used for my mb/cpu
MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 mATX FM2 A75 DDR3 1PCI-E16 2PCI-E1 1PCI SATA3 HDMI DVI USB3.0 Motherboard
AMD A8-5600K APU Quad Core Processor Socket FM2 3.2GHZ 4MB 100W Retail Box
works fine here right out of the box with no BIOS settings. I have Linux Mint 14 Mate running on it. The only issue I had was getting audio over HDMI but for some reason downloading and installing the AMD propitiatory drivers wouldn't install Catalyst. I had to go and install the CCC through the package manager. Reboot and audio over HDMI worked.
If you want to stick to the open source drivers and want to have sound over HDMI (if it doesn't work) try this
Edit to /etc/default/grub and add
radeon.audio=1
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
To make it look like this
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.audio=1"
Haven't tried it with my HTPC but did it with my sons laptop. Also with the laptop I had to disable two settings in the BIOS and create an EFI partition but the install of Linux Mint 14 KDE went smoothly an games seem to be running good with the open source drivers.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/ shows desktops and servers classified by vendor, distro, etc
Scientia est Potentia
due to the motherboard reporting a Linux-supported ethernet device (the common RTL8168) while it was actually using a GbE Ethernet device that does not work with the legacy drivers and didn't even work with a test Windows 7 install until the driver disk was installed.
Model and manufacturer, please! Sounds like bullshit to me.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
only vendor i know https://www.system76.com/
You really need to look past the motherboard as a whole and more at the components that make it up. Going all Intel should give you a really compatible set up. You do have to really read the specs to find out which NIC(s) the board uses, but an intel one should work great. I have had a bit of a caveat with some distros like centos on the newer intel NICs. There's an alternate driver called e1000e that will work stably with those. Distros that use newer kernels, like ubuntu should default to the e1000e driver on those, though. The problem I had with the older 1000e driver was the interface would lock up after a few days, but it was certainly good enough to get online and do initial setup and add the repo where I could get the e1000e driver.
They _come_ with a Linux distro called 'Winki 3'.
For an example, see: http://us.msi.com/product/mb/Z77A-G45-Thunderbolt.html
I've used Tyan (although my last one was a dual P3), Gigabyte and Asus and I finally just switched to Intel boards, primarily to not have to ever use a Realtek (aka Realdreck) ethernet chipset again.
My Gigabyte and Asus boards used Realtek ethernet chipsets and they were total shit, both at the hardware level and at the software level. I ended up buying Intel cards and disabling/uninstalling the Realtek shit as much as possible.
Now I just buy Intel boards and get a decent Intel NIC, although Intel can be a PITA about releasing server OS drivers for what they call "consumer" NICs. The side benefit has been less weird shit and documentation in better English.
Intel boards may not be great "values" (relative to maximum features or overclockability) but they have always been super stable and worked right.
I have found that building such systems myself will end up costing a bit more because I cherry pick better components all around when less powerful options would have sufficed. If this is for an office setup and you're the one that's going to end up doing support for them then you'll want to know what's inside. If you can afford it though it would be better to pass this support issue over to someone else that's already doing desktop linux like System76 - Desktops.
How did you succeed in finding incompatible hardware?
I recently built an FM2 system around an Abit F2A85X-UP4 without any issues.
Flawless migration from my previous box (ga-ma770-ds3 & AMD 9550).
Open source radeon video driver w/ 3D accelleration.
No chips that are not working.
I have built several Linux boxes over the years and had no problem with ASUS. Raspberry Pi is cheap but sloooow.
So you're saying that Windows 8 is fast enough to get the First Post every time? Are you sure you don't work for Microsoft marketing?
Why not buy Linux pre-installed on a machine? Dell, HP, System76 and a number of other places sell Linux pre-installed. Sometimes the cost is slightly higher, but i think it is probably worth it considering all the time you are apparently spending trying to get generic solutions working.
'linux friendly motherboards'
Here's what I found without looking too hard:
http://www.asus.com/Static_WebPage/OS_Compatibility/ ..and pretty much any Intel OEM/retail board will do you fine too.
http://www.ecs.com.tw/extra/event/intel/program0508.html
Generally speaking (and I'm sure there's exceptions to this that others will point out), when it comes to the integrated NIC if you stick to something that uses an Intel PHY you should be fine. Not only do they perform better than most Realtek PHY's but they're better supported by most distros too.
This is what we get for being hostile to the hardware manufactures themselves. There is really no technical reason why hardware makers wouldn't write linux drivers for all their equipment. The motherboard has little to do with this problem and more the chipsets they choose. Virtually every linux install I do has problems like this many of which require bizarre setting changes...don't even get me going on audio.
This is the result of open source ideology. I don't need open source drivers for my sound card. I just need a driver. And there is no reason that a driver written for 2.2 shouldn't work with 1000000.2. If someone takes the time to write an open source version of the driver great, but why won't the zeolots let me the end user decide how I feel about open source vs closed on "my" hardware.
Can we not create a translation layer that could bind to closed source drivers? If the open source drivers have to come with a map to each function so be it. And honestly the driver just needs to work for a few years. If I was running a company with super low margins I just wouldn't want to take on the extra liability of having source code out there for people to crap on. Can we not create a Linux driver SDK like Windows has. MS for all their faults is much nicer to people spending real money making hardware. Heck if we wrote and maintained frameworks for these companies they might actually prefer Linux as most of the work had been done for them.
There is no reason why Linux should always be the last to get good support for new things like Thunderbolt etc.
What I mean is that once you've found a decent vendor for your motherboard, you are going to have to flash the BIOS to the latest version, verify that all the pieces of the motherboard work, etc. Sometimes these processes are difficult to do on Linux.
Make 1 system a standalone Windows 7 box (don't use 8 unless you are nuts). Really, you are dedicating a hard drive to install Windows 7 onto. Load all your update files, test apps, etc. here and verify that each mobo is brought up to a consistent spec.
Checklists are your friend
Doing this will help you harmonize (or homogenize) your environment and make sure that hardware works independent from software issues.
Dell will sell you Ubuntu machines preloaded (give them a call, ignore their website). I personally like System76 and ZaReason, but there are many others..
http://linuxpreloaded.com/
According to Phoronix, the Intel DZ77GA-70K and the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-A2X are fine for Linux. It is implied that almost any motherboard with the Intel Z77 chip set should be OK for linux. They did a longer follow-up review on the ECS Z77H2-A2X Ultimate Golden Edition Extreme with linux.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
My school uses off the shelf Vostro desktops with Xeon processors. They run CentOS no problem.
My local shop would build me what I asked them to, and it would work.
They've got people who know what each week's new motherboards can and can't do - there's no way I could keep up with that.
Of course manually built-to-order is slightly more expensive than buying commodity-boxes-designed-for-Windows off the shelf, but sometimes you get what you pay for.
Intel branded boards seem like a reasonably good bet to work. If this is for an office you won't care about the lack of overclocking features.
You might want to check out avadirect.com. I bought my last laptop from them a couple of years ago with Ubuntu installed. They have a DIY area, and I suspect they'd help you figure out what will work.
For years I've been using Asus motherboards and have never had any major problems. Perhaps some of the reasons for this are that I never go for the flagship models and/or the latest chipsets, never expect everything to work and am always willing to compromise. By the latter I mean in particular that I often end up adding things like sound cards when the Linux kernel I'm using (usually not the latest version) doesn't include support for the one on the motherboard. Graphics cards? Never expect too much or buy separately.
For business solutions that I will be purchasing in bulk, always test first: you may be surprised how well it works, and if not at least you'll learn what to avoid. Just don't take too long testing, because products often disappear from the market before you know it (especially the cheaper boards).
Reviews? I usually don't bother, but I don't think that makes me lazy, since I figure there's usually not a lot to choose from anyway. If I was always to limit myself only to those motherboards that were 100% compatible, that would probably limit my choice too much. It's worth more to me to be able to select what I want based on the hardware specifications alone (the most important ones; not all the bells and whistles).
Pardon me, but you do not "search" Google. You use Google to do a search.
It's like saying, "I need some groceries, so I am going to drive to my car."
And the other responses are correct. SEO and fraudulent reviews didn't exist in 1996. I can no longer count all the times all the reviews for a product said it was good, until just about the time the one I bought started F'ing up. Then suddenly all the reviews are bad. In some ways the internet is worse than the wild west because in the wild west you didn't have ten-thousand people lying to you and trying to steal your money, all at the same time.
Built a couple of Ubuntu 10.04 systems with an Asus P8H77-I ($99), using the on-board graphics. Works great, no BS
I've never purchased from them, but they're the first ones I thought of:
https://www.system76.com/
I think you confuse Linux with Ubuntu.
What works for a Hackintosh will usually work well for Linux. Check http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/search/label/CustoMac. These builds have been well tested and I've used them for Ubuntu successfully.
That would be the case for the phrase "search for Google". Saying "search Google" would mean that Google is what you're searching through, not what you're searching for.
how the hell do you make such a huge mountain out of a molehill?
AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Realtech, VIA
all have been supported in linux as system chipsets for a long fucking time, where the hell are you getting these crackhead mobos you speak of?
Wow. Looks like 2011 was the year of the Linux desktop.
Then why not get a cheap $10 standalone Nic card and just nmot use the one built into the mobo?
You can easily find linux compatible cards.
I have tested Asus Maximus V Gene and it works perfect. Same goes for Gigabyte Ga-970A-UD3, Sapphire PURE Black 990FX. Read about ZaReason Zima 930, ThinkPenguin, Diablotek U310-BB, System76.
When vendors don't publish drivers or specs how is that supposed to happen?
You sign the vendor's non-disclosure agreement and then they provide the specs. So in a way this is a "cost" of being open source, some won't buy into your model. Everything has a cost.
FWIW, as many others have commented, I've been buying Intel motherboards and NICs for over a decade and I've never had a problem.
That is what I do for the most part.
Even put an intel nic into my AM3+ build. But that is because I had a nice quad port server nic laying around at work and no use for it. Yes, I had them sell it to me. For $10.
I have been using MSI motherboards since the late 90s with never a single problem. I am presently putting together a cluster based on MSI 970A-G46 9 AM3+ motherboards, quad core Phenom processors etc... CentOS 6.3 is perfectly happy with it... Not sure what distro you are using, but it sounds more like the Linux version you are using isn't supporting current hardware, instead of non standard hardware... I've been known to be wrong before though.
I have an Asus P8Z77 WS, 100% working with Linux out of the box and has a TPM
socket and supports secure boot and installing your own secure boot signing credentials.
This chip has been used in a lot of AMD motherboards for several years now. You get the driver from Realtek, at http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=5&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#2. Follow the instructions in the README.
I don't know about other versions of Linux but this has been screwed up in Ubuntu for a long time now. The kernel detects this device as another type of ethernet controller and loads the wrong module. And periodically, Ubuntu updates overwrite the driver and you have to re-install the one from Realtek.
You probably would have found this yourself had you googled "rtl8168 driver linux".
ashkenazi jews are the scum of the earth and need to be brutally exterminated. I would personally like to also be involved in their extermination.
Thank you, that was very insightful. Would you suggest gas showers right as we get off the train, or is it better to work us to death first? Would you suggest shooting rockets at Jewish cities, or getting the bombs right on the bus?
I appreciate your contribution to the conversation.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Built systems with their E5 series motherboards (i.e.X9DA) that made my HP vendor cry in the corner asking for his mama.
Must have saved like close to 20 grand by whiteboxing a system spec I slotted from HP for 60 Grand.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I'm sorry, you misunderstood OPs requirements. He wants to run Linux, not Windows.
May I suggest this page http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards
A supported motherboard can even run with an open source BIOS.
Pretty good bet, they'll be Linux compatible.
You're not searching through Google, you're using Google to search through the internet.
Try searching these sites for possibilities.
As with Linux + Hardware, your mileage may vary...
http://www.linux-drivers.org/
http://linuxhcl.com/
I wouldn't sweat it. In my experience, there's rarely a problem. Since everything "just works" 99.5% of the time, I don't even spend time checking unless it's a $600 RAID card. (The top shelf stuff has always been compatible, but worth checking before spending $600 on a card.) It's probably more costly to spend time worrying about it than the $0-$25 it would have cost to put in another NIC card. That was the real problem- the OP choose to spend 3 days instead of just grabbing a different NIC from his parts box or, if gigabit was required, running to Walmart and dropping $22.
well .. if it's " building a few Linux machines for a small office" you definitely want a firewall inbetween there. /netbook whatever they call them all-in-ones nowadays with two nETWORK-iNTERFACE-cARDS (nic) ... shouldnt be a problem : P
no need to build your own.
just get a laptop / ultrabook
like this: http://www.asus.com/Eee/Eee_PC/Eee_PC_1015PE_Seashell/#specifications
chances are that you'll arelready have a a wifi connection available to your run-of-the-mill ISP, so
just NAT (name address translation) the wired gigabit LAN to the wifi.
unless of course your internet connection is actually faster then "n" speed wireless.
then again to be ON topic, find a good (smelly hairry beared) programmer and tell you'll provide
NO shampoo, NO laundry and hardware in question that needs to be opensourced
Pardon me, but you do not "search" Google. You use Google to do a search.
In Soviet Russia, Google searches YOU!
[Sorry, you asked for it.]
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Well, if you're going to be particular, you are searching through Google's index of the Internet. It isn't like every search you make results in a bunch of requests to all the websites to see if it matches your query.
I've had several ASUS motherboards that work fine. My current one is the M5A97 R2.0 (http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM3Plus/M5A97_R20/).
Every time I'm going to build a linux PC (often), I go to the motherboards section on newegg (you may have a different tech savvy retailer but that's mine), tab open the boards that meet the specs, then open the reviews section where users post reviews and ctrl-F "ubuntu" or "linux". There is almost always a nice comment in the reviews for one or two of the boards by a customer who said they booted straight from the install cd and had perfect driver support or something along those lines. So far so good. I have also a had a few friends make HTPC's as their intro to linux and have no snags copying this trick to select compatible hardware esp. motherboards.
A few month's ago I build myself an amd machine and purchased an asrock icafe 870 r2.0 because it was cheap and because it ran my phenom iix6 processor. The windows 7 and 8 both 64-bit had trouble running on this board even with MS south bridge drivers or from AMD, it kept on freezing constantly. But with any linux distros(opensuse, ubuntu, mint, fedora) it ran excellent, no issues. I later decided to go into the motherboard bios and change the storage settings from IDE compatibility to SATA mode only and reinstall windows 7 and weeks later windows 8 with the latest amd south bridge drivers, now there were no issues on both of these MS OS's. I think the open source generic drivers for linux except for video(some amd) work much better out of the box than windows. If intel and amd cpu internal specifications are available freely to developers why not gpu's? Are they afraid somebody will create their own modified directx api for linux?
We build all of our servers with Supermicro boards (X8 annd X9 series). They all work fine with Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL 6. www.germane.com
When some motherboard maker is doing stuff like reporting device types all wrong, they need to be outed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
- Good performance
- BIOS usually OK
- Overclocking not too good though
- No crappy components
Money usually buys you good stuff.
So far I have not encountered any difficulties installing Ubuntu on MSI motherboards and they are not very expensive either. Of course YMMV.
with an Intel i3 540 3.06 Ghz CPU running 64-bit Debian 5.
I think they use that mobo because it has lots of SATA ports.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Regardless of their "official"position, my experience with Linux on Gigabyte boards is excellent, especially the midrange to higher-end boards. One machine that I build 12 yrs ago on a gigabyte board is still running an insurance office, it was a dual-socket Gigabyte P3 board with 2 gigs ram.
Their BIOS setup at least on the server boards is very friendly with Linux
C|N>K
Bingo. There is no reason to even look at anything beyond Intel motherboards unless you are a glutton for punishment. Voice of long experience here. Never the slightest problem with Intel, the prices are right, very reliable, and excellent BIOS features.
I've built several machines throughout the years with asus motherboards.
NIC and sound cards always work, 100%, first time, with built in drivers. Other motherboard features work %100 with these mobos. To include 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound (know you don't care about that).
captcha: firstly
Going to the motherboard's page sometimes help since there maybe review, cooments or even a driver download that leads to Linux drivers
Ubuntu has a few pages which outline supported hardware and certified computers.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
Responses like "No official Linux support, install Windows for best experience" is what keeps the majority of motherboard vendors from being taken seriously for the datacenter/server market. The problem with asking which specific motherboards are GNU/Linux friendly or keeping a hardware compatibility list is the speed of turn over of motherboards. Just because the motherboard model ending in "-A" is GNU/Linux friendly doesn't mean the model ending in "-B" or "-C" will be. Similarly, if "v1" of a motherboard is GNU/Linux friendly, then "v1.1" or "v2" might not be. So, it is preferable to just have a GNU/Linux friendly motherboard company like SuperMicro. We have never gotten a reply like "install Windows for best experience" from SuperMicro.
I've bought about 2 dozen Asus AMD motherboards, and they all work fine in Linux.
Consider yourself fortunate.
ASUS doesn't consider Linux support a priority, and goes out of their way to stymie support for their motherboards. Note that there is *still* no resolution for this issue: the current patch is a hack that "kind of" works, which is the best that can be expected without a datasheet.
Typical motherboard tech specs don't list the SMBus/IO chipsets. So, if you want to ensure your motherboard will have support in Linux, you have to do ridiculous thngs like going online and searching for a high-res photo of the motherboard and hoping you can read the designation screenprinted on the chip (and then checking support status on the lm-sensors site). Or you could try to contact sales support with your technical questions, but that's just *painful*.
So, while it is ASUS' right to restrict their market however they like (including blocking Linux support for their motherboards), it is important to ensure the Linux using subset of the population is aware of ASUS' stance on Linux support—ASUS does not care about your ability to use Linux on their hardware.
"my last install was a three-day affair due to the motherboard reporting a Linux-supported ethernet device (the common RTL8168) while it was actually using a GbE Ethernet device that does not work with the legacy drivers"
After a little bit in this thread, I did a lspci, and I found I have this card.
I am posting this on a gigabit RTL8111/8168B card
works flawlessly on both mint and arch. a few years of rock solid GBit service
If you really want to cut out some of the hassle, try ordering from either of those companies as they both strive to make the best GNU/Linux-compatible devices on the market currently (IMHO).
not Intel soon if there plans to build in cpu in to them with no sockets does not change.
I agree, I've had the best experiences with supermicro. Their OS compatability list is more than sufficient (they don't list Debian, but they cover enough distros that it doesn't matter). For one recent purchase, the list was sufficiently detailed to indicate that a motherboard I'd selected was compatible with FreeBSD 9.0, except the raid controller, which was supported by 8.2 (the driver missed the release window for the 9.0 kernel, but was trivial to compile). Aside from having to compile that one driver, I've never had any compatibility troubles with their motherboards with either Linux or BSD (haven't tried windows). I've also never had one fail (having used a few dozen over the last decade), so can't really comment on their warranty services.
For workstations, I mostly use Asus boards. They tend to have more bells and whistles and also have worked really well for me. I have used Intel boards, and can confirm they are also great but generally fall behind Asus and Supermicro on one end or the other (particularly considering their prices).
Except for laptops and smaller, I generally only buy boards that supprt ECC, that probably weeds out most of the crappy stuff on the market.
As for EFI, I haven't used it on a server or workstation yet, but I have used it on a laptop with an older bios that doesn't have the secure booting crap, or at least it's not enabled. From what I've seen its an ugly mess. Some cool ideas, but really lacking solid userfriendly tools. If you do a fresh install, it might not be too bad. I've only play with converting legacy bios installations to UEFI with and without GPT. For the most part, you can't configure/install the key components for EFI booting on a running system that was booted in legacy mode. The machines I've played with only support net booting with legacy bios (I typically net boot for installs and repair).
Converting a linux install without rewriting the entire disk is actually not too dificult, if you do it just right. However, don't try it unless you are comfortable with loosing the data on the disk. Windows seems to be a lot more finicky about EFI. For one, it will only boot with GPT partition tables (my bios and the linux kernel don't seem to mind using either GPT or legacy tables). Can't say I care enough about windows to have put in the effort to get the conversion to work.
Anyway, EFI is still surmountable, but life is easier if you avoid it and get a friendly board that still supports legacy booting.
I've got like 20 Asus cheapo pcs sitting here all running linux. Just go into the BIOS and set the boot device to the first drive instead of uefi or whatever the fuck it defaults to. Seriously bro, the on board nic works fine...here is the model.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220219
Fuck man...just get away from the keyboard...MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE!
We use with rather acceptable results zotac (see zotacusa.com) Mini-ITX boards
an Atom Ion2 board will be enough for most randome office work :-))
and an I7 with an Nvidia GT640 will serve quite well as an high end dual full HD dev machine (or gaming console
And the price/size ratio is quite nice.
For a "pure dev" machine you can up power from the atom config and down price from the I7 using a GT430 + I3 the 430 can be avaiable as an embedded option and helps you get a nice quite machine, but you'll get only 20 fps or so on dual screen games... wich might be enough ....
Of course using Nvidia boards means having decent perf on the proprietary closed source driver, but it's non free...
or using the nouveau driver wich has it's set of limitations....
For our specific usage it's currently the only effective solution, for most people there are many other GPU's options...
(compatible with the same Zotacs boards)...
I build and run servers for a living. Many of the boxes I get are gently used servers or retail motherboards. The server boards are usually the least of my problems, because the things that need to be compatible are fewer - disks, memory, and network. Crappy video is OK if it works. Sound doesn't matter. It's always better if I update the BIOS to a known good (recent) level before starting. I know of one OEM who shipped us Supermicro boards with CentOS installed as the default OS. They worked great.
Desktop systems are more of a problem, due to the need for high quality video and sound and possibly other hardware. I have had better luck with Ubuntu on laptop/desktop systems than with CentOS.
Intel board weirdness/compatibility - One really weird thing that I ran into recently was an Intel DH61WW desktop board. It was set to boot Gentoo from a flash drive, but would not find the USB stick about one out of ten tries. Intel only supports certain boards for the server channel and the desktop channel - I could not get drivers for this same board in Windows Server 2008, so I popped in a $15 TRENDnet nic and it worked fine. Only a good solution if you have the free slots.
I've got a couple of PCs with the Asus P8Z68-V LX running 64-bit CentOS 6.3 and/or Ubuntu 12.04 without any issues at all. Newegg has them for $80 and they support 32GB RAM, SATA 3, USB 3 and have decent onboard graphics (with plenty of slots for beefier cards). I don't see anything in this price range that a) works 100% with Linux and b) has good specs like this MB.
One nice thing - the BIOS is dead easy to upgrade - none of this Windows-only (or DOS-on-a-floppy!) rubbish: there's a built in filestore navigator in the BIOS and it picks up a .ROM file off a USB stick without any problems. And, yes, Asus do BIOS updates even for MBs like these which aren't that new or anywhere near the top of their range.
It should be noted that it's an LGA 1155/Z68 MB, which may or may not work with Ivy Bridge CPUs (I used a "lowly" i7 2600 Sandy Bridge in mine). I'm sure there must be an Asus equivalent to this MB that does.
Linus.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium-technology-prize-finalist-linus-torvalds/
I like my MacBook Pro. What I don't like is that Apple dropped the 17" MacBook Pro from the line-up. That's what mine is and it's about tyme I get a new one. But unfortunately the biggest MacBook Pro now is only 15". Now why would Apple put a retina display on a 15" laptop but not a 17"? Using as high a resolution as that on a small display is stupid, just how many people can distinguish the details on such a small display?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You appear to be unaware of the details of protected content vis-a-vis Flash; I shall try to lay it out for you:
Protected content sold by Amazon, and also by Google Play, is protected via Adobe Flash Access.
Adobe Flash Access relies on a unique machine identifier to implement the key escrow in order to lock your content to the download machine so that it can not be re-uploaded in a digital form without having to use the analog hole in order to degrade the content.
The way it obtains this unique machine identifier is by synthesis of a lot of different machine information via libhal (a library with an associated daemon, intended as a Hardware Abstration Layer). As you can easily see here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal libhal has been deprecated since May of 2008, yet Adobe chose to require it anyway.
This four-year-out-of-date library is not installed by default on Ubuntu systems, and doesn't give the answers Adobe Flash Access wants in order to be able to successfully run on 64 bit systems. Even when hacked up, there are typically symptoms during video playback, such as the video playing fine up to the first commercial break, and then after the commercial, the audio continues working, but the video is nothing but a black screen.
These problems do not occur on a 32 bit Linux, as they do on a 64 bit Linux running 32 bit software. The need to support multiple Linux platforms, combines with the Jan 31st 2012 rollout of the new version of Adobe Flash Access protection on content by Amazon no doubt influenced the decision, announced Feb 20 2012, to drop Adobe Flash Support for Linux outside official Google Chrome builds: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html
Now that you have the context, do my earlier comments on 64bit vs. 32 bit make more sense?
I might be late with this, but if you are considering ASUS motherboards, this can help:
http://www.asus.com/websites/global/aboutasus/OS/Linux.pdf
so, you had a new realtek GbE chip that wasn't yet supported by the old realtek driver? so what? copy a new kernel, done deal dude. not rocket science. it's not like this hasn't been the case since for, oh, i dunno, EVERY TIME THE PCI DEVICE ID CHANGES ON SOME NEW ON-BOARD CHIP?
Look dude, I'm the one who tracked down the bug. I'm the one who reported it to all the UEFI BIOS vendors, and as far as I know, H2O is the only company which has fixed their implementation to list the code and data tagging to place that static library into the runtime services region rather than the boot time services so that it's not reclaimed out from under the runtime services by an aggressive OS page reclaim.
I know the specification, and I know that the implementation doesn't match the specification for almost every UEFI implementation out there. I know about the talks on attack surface, but that's not going to fix the F-ed up BIOS in hardware that's already out there, and motherboard vendors generally don't ship BIOS updates unless they pay the contracted BIOS company to do the work, and they only do that for problems which can't be worked around in software.
For the (majority) busted UEFI implementations, the workaround of delaying the reclaim of the pages until the memory call has been made leaves the attack surface open. Not delaying the reclaim of the pages doesn't close the attack window, it just moves it into whatever crap the OS has loaded into those pages rather than whatever crap that UEFI had there before the boot time services were terminated.
That aside, regardless of whether the busted UEFI leaves the attack surface there, the point is that, like POSIX conformance testing, when the spec and the code disagree, the code wins. Period.
This is the same problem the ACPI implementation has been suffering from for years: The vendor can make it totally correct according to the specification, or they can make it possible to continue booting unmodified Microsoft Windows distributions. The result is that the ACPI implementation never gets totally technically correct.
You can keep modding my posts down because you don't like their content, but it won't make the content untrue, or make that truth any less inconvenient for people like the OP who had problems getting Linux running on their UEFI based grey boxes they were trying to build themselves.
I've told the OP where to put the workaround in Linux, and I've told the OP where the bug lives in the UEFI implementation (good luck getting the vendor to fix that just for Linux, unless there's an offer to pay their BIOS vendor contract costs for doing the work, or an offer to buy a large enough number of units in a single order with the sale condition on getting the fix.
It'd be nice if the vendors fixed the bug so Linux didn't have to work around it, and it's also be nice for Linux if nVidia and ATI released the sources to the hardware acceleration portions of their drivers too, but that's just not going to happen without some serious $ changing hands.
I guarantee you that the bug report I filed with Apple (one of the vendors with a broken UEFI from using the broken Intel reference implementation) has been P3'ed as a "nice to have", and then moved to a component where it's not visible to most Apple engineers who could actually fix the problem, if they had a bug report to hang the fix on.
So, Ubuntu is the Amazon advertising tool. Linux is just a kernel. Run OpenBSD, it's better anyways.
I have built several Ubuntu 12.04 Servers with GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI. They always boot first try, every time. Put two together and had them on the network in 1 hr. Can go as big as you need, but may be a bit much for lower end systems.
http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4287#ov
By use of the word 'friendly' I think what the OP is looking for is a manufacturer who have invested in linux and early on.
Perhaps a dev working on kernel patches, something like that.
Linux Foundation Platinum members: HP, Fujitsu, IBM (IBM), Intel (INTC), NEC, Oracle (ORCL), Qualcomm (QCOM), Samsung.
A blog I run for the wealth
If you are too silly to research, then just buy something and see if it works. Return and repeat the process. Somewhere in there you'll learn to search the internet and use linux.
Hi dotancohen
I just recently built a new pc
acquired through my local mom n pop pc store.
I too asked for no UEFI or
at least no Secure Boot.
He researched it and found
the asus M5A78L-M LX Plus mobo, with
the AMD FX4100 quad core processor.
It uses the plain old school bios.
None of this new M$ lock out bull sh-t!
You can do 2, 4, 6, or 8 core as needed.
So far, alls well with it.
I run Ubu, and so far no hickups.
Give this combo a try.
I believe that youll do fine with it.
Al D.
Actually buy a server board, if your building a server. A quick search on newegg for "UEFI" under server boards came back to 0 results. This is because most servers are *nix based. The manufactures will not build them to require UEFI until you can install Linux on them. On principle, if your building a server build a server. Not a PC that your calling a server.