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Ask Slashdot: Linux-Friendly Desktop x86 Motherboard Manufacturers?
storkus writes: The release of Haswell-E and a price drop on Devil's Canyon has made me itch for a PC upgrade. However, looking around I discovered a pair of horror stories on Phoronix about the difficulties of using Linux on a multitude of motherboards. My question: if MSI, Gigabyte, Asus (and by extension Asrock) are out, who's left and are they any good? I'd like to build a (probably dual-boot, but don't know for sure) gaming and 'other' high-end machine with one of the above chips, so we're talking Z97 or X99; however, these stories seem to point to the problems being Windows-isms in the BIOS/UEFI structures rather than actual hardware incompatibility, combined with a lousy attitude (despite the Steam Linux distro being under development).
The very "friendliest" and most productive manufacturer of ANYTHING. MY ASS. Yeah. Turds baby! Sniff em and weep biatches!
They're about as vanilla as it's possible to get, which is what you have to do to get anything working with minimal kernel module hacking.
It's the OSNews of the 21st Century.
Buy Gigabyte, their shit is rock solid.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You can disable UEFI and use CSM boot; it still works with Win 8.1. Asus Z87 boards worked fine with Ubuntu 14.xx for me.
Desktop Linux has a pretty laughable market share. Geeks are already difficult to deal with as consumers, freetards are even worse as they eventually turn on most of their supporters, in some cases even carrying out nasty little campaigns for some perceived betrayal. Makes companies like Nvidia wonder why they even bother.
Intel.
Look, SteamOS isn't going anywhere or doing anything. Valve isn't going to make a fourth Console work, even by outsourcing the hardware work to a bunch of volunteers.
MSI X99 boards at least claim SteamOS compatibility out of the box.
In my books that should mean Linux works.
Some archive apps like WinRAR can extract files from self-extracting EXE files. Also look around for other softwares that can do this.
In some cases a command line option will allow the EXE to be extracted but not installed - but you have to do some digging.
Of course - the above is provided that you have at least one Windows machine around.
Also check around on the Motherboard manufacturer site - sometimes they offer both an EXE and a ZIP archive, and if nothing else contact their support. If nobody pesters them about the problem then they don't care.
And finally - also look at Tyan and Supermicro for motherboard, even though their target is server motherboards they may have some suitable motherboards for you.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Is setting a bunch of flags really a horror story? Really? How is this possible if you are BUILDING a computer?
But I have built many of Linux systems on AMD/Asus platform. Not sure about the Intel stuff. But rarely have had any issues. YMMV.
I've built about 9 computers in the past 4 years and have run various flavors of Linux on all of them (mostly LTS builds of Ubuntu), and I've never had compatibility problems with the motherboard. Nowadays nobody can really afford not to support Linux, so I think the important thing is to wait a little while for the chipset drivers to get integrated into the newest builds of the Linux kernel, and then go from there. I've had issues with USB 3.0 support for an older CentOS version, but overall everything works for the most part. Linux even works better out of the box than a clean install of Windows 7 sometimes, because Win7 doesn't have drivers for a lot of common NICs, whereas Linux usually did. As you mentioned, in the latest computers I've built, the UEFI did give me more problems than traditional BIOS, but they weren't show-stoppers by any means, just a google search away from a resolution.
It's hard to find a friendly desktop motherboard for a desktop unfriendly OS.
WTF is he talking about? I heard and saw nightmares with ASUS but MSI boards have always installed Linux instantly. They barely support UEFI as an afterthought and you can turn it off pretty easily.
I've built three boxes with MSI A75a-e35 and AMD A-8 and A-10 with no issues running Linux Mint 15/16/17, well except two of the boards had issues after 6 months. The replecement boards are working fine though.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Intel is closing down their motherboard lines. It pisses me off since they were all I'd buy in the past, but they aren't going to be an option for much longer :(.
People need to stop buying hardware that isn't properly supported under free software operating systems. Right now there are only a few companies, organizations, and individuals actively pushing for better support and the majority of those aren't the people who you'd think would be pushing it.
Companies/people on my bad list include companies like: System76, Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA, AMD, Linus Torvalds, and others who have been uncooperative and even hostile toward free software.
Then there are others who you'd more typically expect to be hostile: Dell, HP, Lenovo/IBM, Toshiba, Apple, and Sony to name a few. These companies are actively utilizing digital restrictions to prevent users from replacing incompatible parts with compatible parts.
This isn't even getting into the buggy BIOS problems and the fact every company is testing against Microsoft Windows rather than designing to standards-or that most are forcing propritary software down users throats (MS Windows licenses, the BIOS, and other firmware components).
This said Intel has been pretty good in some areas and so has HP. However I'd be weary about both companies in one regarded or another.
Some companies/organization/people on my good list:
ThinkPenguin, Inc (computer hardware and accessories)
Aleph Objects, Inc (makers of a 3d printer)
Adrian Chadd (formerly employed by Qualcom Atheros)
Luis R. Rodriguez (formerly employed by Qualcom Atheros)
Tehnoetic
I just upgraded to an i5 with a GA-Z87X-D3H mobo. I've got it triple-booting (GRUB has LinuxMint 17 or Windows Loader). If I select Windows, then the windows loader gives me the option of XP-32bit or windows 7-64bit. I can attest to the fact that it is the UEFI crap in the BIOS that causes issues, but once you turn it off, all the problems disappear. All in all, money well spent and I'm quite content
As always, YMMV
Good luck
Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity!
Those horror stories mention Gigabyte and MSI.
No guarantees, but in my experience I use ASRock. At first I was very sceptical (they started out as budget boards) but my early Haswells work great on Linux.
I had a Gigabyte (now the Windows gaming machine) but when I tried to VT-d, Gigabyte BIOS didn't implement it despite the processor's support. ;-( Never looked back.
Replacing the bios might be hard, but if the vendors don't want to provide a good working product, then replace the bios with an open bios. I was looking at upgrading my current system, but if the common hardware vendors are being dicks, then I will look at supporting an open hardware vendor. As a PC user (not a laptop user), power management isn't as big an issue, but if a badly implemented bios results in a poor running computer, then I will be pissed. I have a list of vendors I'm never going to support again. If a vendor told me 'go use a different operating system', I would tell them to get into another line of business.
Its so extensive that it makes a good general reference when purchasing hardware.
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/
Have been using ASUS boards for linux-only computers for years, without any compatibility problems. BIOS updates come as a ZIP file that extracts into a BIN file that you can install from the BIOS itself: just download and extract the file to a USB drive from your favorite OS, then boot into the BIOS and perform the update, rebooot and all done.
They are not related. ASRock may have originated from Asus, but that was over a decade ago. They have long since been their own distinct, separate brand.
I built my machine on Gigabyte's motherboard over a year ago, no problems with multitude of linux distros I've installed there. And I ditched Windows, too.
Difficult to flash the BIOS is a horror story? How did Soulskill let this through with editing, or was this some sort of deliberate troll headline to generate hits?
Asked here about a year an a half ago:
Ask Slashdot: Linux-Friendly Motherboard Manufacturers?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
or not... they sell boards with bent cpu pins and refuse to replace them. that's a dick move.
More like minor issues with a BIOS updater, and one shoddy implementation of power management.
Bad ACPI implementations tend to get blacklisted in the kernel, just like on Windows. Either way, Linux will still run just fine on these boards.
Actually, I'd expect more trouble with Windows on boards from these manufacturers, since at least MSI ships some pretty horrible 'support software' with their boards, to enable various board functions, and everyone knows how third party drivers and windows interact for that truly wonderful 'windows experience' or random unreproducible + undebuggable problems - particularly with cheap and nasty high volume far eastern parts (eg. on corporate LANs, certain very popular brand of network controller used on similar boards has a lovely driver for windows 7, that causes regular blue screens, when the network is under high load - no such problem on Linux).
Have used Gigabyte in 2 builds and Biostar with AMD dual core on one. All running linux. Have been using linux on my desktops since 2009. Without any issue with motherboard (except one below).
Stable wheezy wouldnt recognize ethernet on Gigabyte H87 board. Had to use a PCI card to get latest kernel and its been rock solid for more than a year.
> Why? EFI is convient.
EFI is an overengineered piecee of shit nobody (save those dreaming of consumer control) really needs. BIOS should just load the OS. Boards and chipsets should come with docs (yes, nowadays machine readable, in ROM) about how to set things up.
Not with backdoors (sometimes sold as remote management goodies).
I only skimmed the "horror stories", but as you said, they seem to be mostly about problems with updating the BIOS. The actual hardware support should work out of the box under Linux in nearly all cases, unless you want to get at really specific motherboard features. If you think you need those, you should know which ones exactly (they are probably the reason you'd chose this particular motherboard), and do some research if there are Linux drivers available.
Asrock offers BIOS updates for "Instant Flash" without an OS (e.g. Z97, random model). When I bought an Asrock motherboard some years ago, they didn't offer this for the particular model I bought, so I emailed their support. They mailed back that the BIOS update could be dangerous for early steppings of this board and this was the reason it was not publicly available; told me how to figure out my stepping, and gave me a link to an "Instant Flash" image I could use at my own risk. Can't complain about this.
So if you are worried about BIOS updates, it works just fine with Asrock motherboards according to my experience.
There's also a tool called "flashrom" that can flash the BIOS directly under Linux, but it doesn't work with all motherboards.
I realize that people who treat open source as a religion with MS or Apple standing in for the devil will balk at the idea of running Linux under a more user friendly, more compatible, easier to maintain OS, but it actually works quite well for most applications.
It's not perfect. GPU performance takes a huge hit, so you'll probably want to shy away with it for hardcore GPU accelerated tasks, but the overhead in terms of CPU performance is negligible so long as you have the cores and the RAM.
And many distros support standard drivers such as VMWARE's. It's a lot better than running Cygwin or trying to hack OSX to get a good compile for open source Linux software in most cases.
Slashdot has been epically, if possibly inadvertently, trolled.
Google hardware for linux and you will find the Ubuntu hsl in moments. Bam, done.
Or, just pick any random board and install. You've got to be looking for incompatibility, outside a small minority of parts.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I boot freedos from a usb stick when I need to update BIOS. I don't see it as a problem; freedos is as free as linux is, and rebooting is necessary for bios updates anyway. .EXE-files for bios updating tends to run fine under freedos.
The first "horror story" is specifically regarding flashing BIOS from Linux via USB. I don't understand how this is related to modern motherboards - in fact, I see it as an issue that is disappearing. This is a situation I have had on OLDER, pre-UEFI motherboards - the requirement to run an EXE from an installed version of Windows, rather than from a boot floppy that didn't care what OS was installed. Many (including my Asrock) modern mobos can update right from the UEFI system without even spinning up the boot drive.
The second is specific to power management on laptops (I will admit to tl;dr speed-reading here), which is clearly not what the OP is talking about.
Tempest in a teacup. The ONLY thing that doesn't work so well with my dual boot system with my July 2014 Asrock motherboard is enabling the accelerated boot system which just makes plain sense, as it relies on caching a booted state to disk to skip a lot of init. I was at first nervous about UEFI, having read a ton of FUD a couple of years back, but it really is a non-issue. If anything, I like the low-level system management on my Asrock better than the old Award/Phoenix dominated BIOS systems.
It neglects to say which cities, which direction the ash is likely to spread, or provide a diagram to aid in that understanding.
I would generally go for Intel boards as Intel stuff is generally well supported by Linux...
Otherwise i would go for higher end boards aimed at servers or highend workstations - while manufacturers of cheap desktops generally ignore Linux, manufacturers of servers definitely can't and will ensure their boards contain appropriate components.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Sounds like MSI are being douchebags by putting a custom .exe archive (which most archiver software can usually open directly, by the way) inside a .zip file, but do you really need a complete Windows installation on the computer with the motherboard-to-be-flashed? Ever tried Windows LiveCDs like Hiren's?
They want their post back.
Seriously Linux motherboard compatibility nowadays is a good if not better(more legacy support) than the latest Microsoft OS.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Fedora is the only major distro which is cryptographically signed by Microsoft-- so if you use it you can skip the difficult task of trying to deactivate SecureBoot (and keeping it deactivated, many bioses seem to randomly re-enable it), plus your machine stays secure... which is a nice perk.
Ever. I've used motherboards from Dell, HP, Intel, Gigabyte (which had issues with windows interestingly, piece of shit and I'll never buy again), and Asus.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
My main PC has an ASRock H77 Pro/MVP and I have zero problems with Fedora, all hardware recognized, UEFI works fine, CSM was disabled by default and I never bothered to turn it on, but most distros should work fine with it now.
I've never had an issue running Linux (the kernel) on any motherboard I have every tried.
Please try to understand that 99% of angry posts on the Internet about how "this shit doesn't work" are really saying "I can't make it work because I don't know how and I'm mad."
I've installed Linux on systems I've built with Gigabyte motherboards for years. Works great. No problems. Even a Haswell mobo I got a year or so ago.
The key is Intel graphics. Linux works great with Intel graphics, but I have never gotten it to work reliably with any other graphics.
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While there are still some issues, ASPM or whatever stupid power-saving functions you may find on MB just don't count.
They're just annoying, I mean, really fucking annoying. Everytime I install new Windows I have to manually turn off all these: monitor auto-off, CPU throttling, hard-disk auto-off, ASPM, USB suspend etc etc. How much money can you actually save by ASPM or other things? Nothing!
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/B85MG/
(Combined with a G1820)
I run Arch Linux on it, no problems so far.
I have had approximately 0 issues installing Manjaro (a ubuntified arch distro) on an ASUS motherboard with their bizzaro UEFI bootloader. Everything "just worked" with few, if any, changes to settings.
I've probably had more issues trying to get Windows to boot on this board, as 7, for instance, just refuses to boot in UEFI mode.
There's plenty of blame to go around on both sides here.
The motherboard manufacturers – pretty much all of them – are to blame for developing and shipping really crappy firmware. (Unfortunately, this is pretty much par for the course – 95% of all firmware is crap, no matter what it's for. Modern hardware companies, with a few obvious exceptions like Apple, just don't do software very well at all.)
The Linux kernel devs are to blame for being stubborn about "standards-compliance" versus the real world. From what I can tell in clicking through a few links, the ACPM feature was working in the past, but the kernel devs then deliberately broke it by changing it to only work if the BIOS advertises it properly. Yes, the standard says that's what is supposed to happen. But we know from experience that manufacturers often don't follow standards. Linux needs to deal with the world as it is, not as the devs wish it would be.
Msi, gigabyte, asus, and not by extension asrock since they are not and never have been related are not out, so why is this a slashdot story? Do we just publish any idiotic story here now?
If you *really* want to be sure of Linux compatibility, buy a workstation motherboard from, e.g., SuperMicro. The kit won't be cheap, and it won't come even close to "top GHz" but it will be stable as a mountain. ECC memory, Xeon or Opteron processors. And if you write SuperMicro support asking, e.g., for the parameters for the sensors chips, they will reply with the required formulae so that you can convert from raw readings to the real temperatures/voltages, etc.
Forget about BIOS/EFI upgrades, or overclocking. HP and Lenovo are the only workstation vendors which are bios-update-happy. Dell, Supermicro and the others release two or three such updates during the entire life cycle of the motherboard. Hell, you need to pester supermicro for a beta update to get the microcode updated!
You *will* need to put money into a proper soundcard, as well. These boards have übershit utterly noisy as all hell onboard audio. And pay attention to the storage ports as well, as the typical user would add a PCIe 3.0 x8 SAS 6Gbps RAID card that costs half as much as the motherboard, so they often don't have much in the way of on-board ports.
OTOH, if the other components are also good, it won't crash. Ever. They will happily run 24/7/365 at full blast for years.
Rather than building one from scratch, you could buy a box that's certified to run Linux. Unlike the old days, I find that nowadays you really can't build a box any cheaper than you can buy one from companies like Lenovo or HP, and Lenovo has several boxen that are "Linux ready."
Personally I think my box-building days are over. I no longer play video games, so all I'm really interested in is a fast CPU and a PCI16 slot for my "silent" (no fans) video card, and audio and networking that are supported by Linux (which is pretty much everything Lenovo sells; I haven't looked into HP -- I don't like their reliability ratings.)
Regardless, I couldn't come up with pricing any better than about $800 + tax + shipping no matter how I scrounged, and that was only for a Core i5, not a Core i7. It's about another $150 to bump up to an i7, but I don't *need* a quad i7 for what I do. I'd *like* one, but I don't *need* it.
I think I'd get more of a performance boost out of using my PCI video card to offload the memory access from the CPU channels than I would out of bumping from an i5 to an i7.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
My question: if MSI, Gigabyte, Asus (and by extension Asrock) are out, who's left and are they any good?
Are you kidding me?
If its a simple case of you being too lazy to disable UEFI in the bios, dont buy a motherboard with it.
All the manufactures you listed have boards without UEFI, find them before you buy without knowledge.
I have an Asus Z87 board, absolutely no problems whatsoever. I've booted several distros on it and it just works.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I built a system last week with a: 1) i5 4690 2) asus z97-a
Then I installed a Fedora 20 (Mate Edition) and everything went fine but one thing. The installation kernel did not recognize the intel ethernet. I plugged in an old Realtek PCI, did a "yum upgrade" and with kernel 3.15 even the intel ethernet started working.
Hope it helps.
I run Linux (Fedora 20) on MSI motherboards almost exclusively. No problems. I just replaced an old MSI mobo with an nVidia/AMD based one, and the only thing I had to change was the MAC address in the network configuration, Linux came up perfectly.
I like to use ECC even on the desktop, and yes there are ways to do it. At a cost.
On the Intel side, the CPU is not really the problem. "Small" Xeons like the E3-1225V3 are attractive for their price/performance even if you run them on desktop boards and don't use ECC support. In that setup they are like i7 parts with slightly lower clock speeds.
For the board though, the choices are limited and you have to shell out an additional 100 Euros or more for a "small server" board, because the typical desktop chipsets don't support ECC.
Add the extra price for the ECC RAM, maybe 50 Euros difference depending on how much RAM you want, and you end up paying something like 150 Euros extra.
AMD used to be really nice, with most processors (pre-Llano all desktop parts but Sempron) supporting ECC RAM and some mainboards also supporting it. The mainboard choices for ECC support were a bit limited, cheapskates like Asrock usually did not bother to support ECC RAM. So you might have had to pay 10 Euros more for the board, plus the above 50 Euros extra for the RAM. Made maybe 60 Euros difference to have ECC RAM in your rig.
Sadly, their APUs don't support ECC. AFAIK the FX line still does, but it is not really attractive compared to recent Intel models.
C - the footgun of programming languages
...because Linux on the desktop is dead, and has been, for a very long time.
I didn't immediately think shill. The previous fourth console (OUYA) appears to have failed to take away any market share from the big three. What makes Steam Machine different?
I recently acquired an Asus Maximus VII Hero (Z97 chipset ofc, paired with a Devil's Canyon) and everything works out of the box with Mint 17. Not sure what you're raging about.
..they ought to take some laxatives.
Using Gigabyte Z97-D3H here, I plugged in my old hd with Arch Linux on it and it booted right away, no problems whatsoever with anything on it, then I installed windows 8.1 with qemu and passed through the nvidia card to run it as a gaming system on the 2nd monitor (qemu is freaking awesome now apparently).
Running it in mbr mode since the system was already installed and worked out of the box.
The only non-OS problem was that it ran the RAM at 1333, I had to go into the bios and change memory profiles to make it run at 2400.
So sad to hear Intel is going out of the mobo business. True, some were duds, but overall, my lappy's Intel and my desktop Intel have held out remarkably well over the years (they're both c.2008) and have accepted at least 3 iterations of Windows, 3 different Hackintosh versions and any Ubuntu since 8.10.
"One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions some how Windows specific.
It seems unfortunate if we do the work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works without having to do the work.
Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.
Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.
Or maybe we could patent something related to this." Bill Gates, Jan 1999
- Go with a reputable motherboard vendor that will be there for the long haul (Asus, Gigabyte, or Intel)
- Get a workstation class board marketed specifically for workstations and durability, focus on the lifetime rating for capacitors/electronics and overall heat/thermal management. Ensure the system has nice diagnostics to help troubleshoot when critical components fail. These boards are generally $300-500.
- Wait for the motherboard to go through a few bios revisions and for the particular model to be added to one of the major distribution hardware compatibility lists (Redhat or Ubuntu).
- Check the motherboard manual to see if there are any limitations on ECC memory, frequently ECC memory is only supported at lower speeds and reduced sizes - generally go with boards with more comprehensive ECC memory support.
- When you have the option, choose motherboards with Intel parts for networking/etc and avoid Marvell and other parts from no-name or niche vendors (unless those vendors have a good record of supporting Linux with up-to-date patches to mainline kernel).
- If you want something commercially off-the-shell already fully built supported long term, you need to buy a workstation system marketed as Linux compatibile from a major vendor (Specific Dell Precision Workstation Models, HP) but the price markups on these will exceed most budgets.
I have 3 asrock based computers...two of them 970 extreme 3 mobos running Linux Mint debian. Bios upgrade from the bios menu is easy and quick.
You read "a couple" stories of problems. As in TWO, out of millions. Most motherboards will be fine.
To be sure, a gaming board and a server board have similar requirements- plenty of memory slots, etc. Supermicro makes boards designed for Linux servers, which are frequently used for high-priority workloads.
If updating your BIOS is the *most* important feature of a motherboard, sorry.
I've never had a problem with MSI, Gigabyte or Asus . And the one time in a blue moon I had to update a bios, I simply booted off a USB HDD with windows on it.
Your deciding which car to buy based on how hard it is to adjust the cam shaft timing.
Clicking through to the Phoronix link it's from October 2011 and the latest comments from November 2012. Hardly seems relevant when thinking about purchasing currently new hardware.
My Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H with i7-4790k and GTX 780 Ti is working near perfectly in Linux. The 'near' is because I have to implement a small workaround for an audio bug. From my /etc/modprobe.d/local-alsa.conf:
# Purpose currently to add 'snoop=0' to snd-hda-intel module options. This works around an issue that causes noisy/static/skipping audio. Something to do with CPU idle states. Apparently fixed by adding the PCI IDs into the driver so it uses a PCH workaround. Patch should be in 3.15-rc8 and later. options snd-hda-intel snoop=0
They are more focused on the server and workstation markets, so might be a while before they have a ddr4 gaming board. They do certify compatability with a number of linux distros and freebsd (even if they list it as another linux distro). For example: http://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/OS/Z87.cfm
I've used a number of their boards for servers and workstations, running linux and freebsd for many years. Most recently, I got one for a haswell xeon workstation. Net install with uefi and grub + uefi boot (mostly for kicks) works seamlessly. I've had no problems with the motherboard at all.
This is a piss poor analogy considering someone might want to buy a car specifically to modify the engine's components where ease of cam timing adjustment is a nice assed feature.
I think you are going totally the wrong direction.... The author is correct that NONE of the desktop manufactures currently care anything about Linux Specific support of compatibility. Again the Desktop Market.
To get great *NIX Support, Top end Hardware, Computational Horse Power, and Torque; Go Look at Server Grade Mother Boards.
I just finished a test build of Gentoo in full UEFI mode on an Asrock Q87 board. The problem I discovered is pretty god damn simple. To get a UEFI aware install, You need UEFI aware media to boot in UEFI mode. Otherwise you're screwed.
The only media I'm aware of that works reliably in either mode is the System Rescue Live CD images (use Rufus to place on a flash drive). You then have to use the F11 key during boot to get to the UEFI Boot Manager (Part of the Specification) to select the media. If you don't see the flash drive the first time, reboot as the system did not detect it during post. Once it's visable, you can then choose to boot using either plain usb (bios) or uefi mode.
As I stated, it's a "Chicken and Egg" problem but once you've managed to boot into UEFI mode, you can install what ever flavor of Linux you want. In the case of Gentoo, You will need to use the System Rescue Disk/Flash to boot a working kernel to complete the installation of the boot loader (if using Gentoo you also need to enable the new kernel command line and enter on that the rootfs=partuuid followed by the id. Very important as most of the tools I've tested do not work well. This only applies if you're doing a pure UEFI boot (label the kernel bootxt64.efi and place it in the /boot/efi directory so the UEFI system can find it). Once you boot into the new working kernel (minimalism is you friend) you can finish the build.
I've found that a 16GB flash drive is actually large enough to hold the entire portage tree (offline installations are nice) and go from there. Makes it much easier when you're trying to diagnose a damn ethernet or wifi connection
ALI MotherBoards or how about VIA??
Hmm sound familiar?
I mean seriously people is it really that difficult. Or are there issues of complacency and stupidity?
If there's a BIOS or hardware issue with a board, but yet it works fine in Windows (probably because MS created a work-around), then guess what Linux users. Stop complaining, and PATCH YOUR OS!
See, this is the issue with Linux in general. If there is the tiniest glitch, or change in the hardware, it breaks the OS. And since there's only a handful of developers actually working on the Kernel (and they are doing it as a HOBBY at that), serious, show stopping issues, never get fixed.
Linux was, is, and always will be a hobbyist OS at it's core. Nothing more.
If you get one that's been out for 3-6 months, and is popular, it's got a really good chance of everything being supported. 9 months, and it's most likely got pretty much full support. If it's from a major manufacturer, and isn't targeted at a specific market, it's likely supported.
I bought a Gigabyte Series 7 m/b late last year. Back in Jan, my 6-yr-old m/b died, and I rebuilt my system. I run CentOS, same as RHEL, which is *not* "cutting" (or bleeding) edge like fedora, and *everything* was supported. Just watch out for FUD, and try to get some feel whether there's a *lot* of screaming out there about Linux not supporting something, or it's just one or two idiots making a lot of noise that's getting propagated.
mark
This is a bit like noting a number of minor manufacturers people never heard of failed to gain any marketshare in the early MP3-player market, therefore it was folly to expect Apple to succeed.
Except in this analogy, the "number of minor manufacturers" are companies like Fairchild (Channel F), Umtech (VideoBrain), Atari (2600/7800), Philips/Magnavox (Odyssey 2), Mattel (Intellivision), Coleco (ColecoVision/Adam), and NEC (TurboGrafx), and the Apples are Nintendo and Sony. It usually takes three tries for Microsoft to get something right (DOS 3, Windows 3, Surface Pro 3), and video game consoles were no different (Windows CE for Dreamcast, Xbox, Xbox 360). Valve, on the other hand, has shown that it can't even count to three (HL2, HL2 Episode 2, L4D 2, Portal 2).
I've used Gigabyte MBs exclusively for 15 years and I only run Linux. My latest MB is a Z87 with UEFI. No problems with Linux. Boots to usable desktop in under 10 seconds. No problems booting Linux off a USB stick either. During these 15 years I've never had a Gigabyte MB fail.
NVIDIA, AMD
Nvidia is pushing free 3D! drivers for their Tegra chipsets. Many AMD motherboards support coreboot.
Hi. I have opted to get DELL system with Ubuntu recently to be on safe side. Something to consider as well.
Servant of karma
...desktop motherboards are usually far less well supported.
That's nothing: Intel "Advanced Management Technology" (AMT), has an embed CPU in the chipset that runs a small webserver (Enabling you to remotely control a few settings) and a VNC server (So you can have remote screen/mouse without needing neither a KVM nor OS collaboration).
It's a technology available on most enterprise-oriented servers, workstations and desktops. (Makes life of sysadmin easier).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
ASROCK did have a period where they were doing some weird stuff. Remember the adaptable CPU slot things that they did for 939/AM2 IIRC but most of that weirdness was for AMD mobos
Of course, that will be for AMD only. At that time, only AMD did have the memory controller embed in the CPU.
The CPU itself communicated with a very standard HyperTransport bus with the chipset.
So you could easily have either:
- swappable CPU+RAM boards on a HT backbone (common in the server & cluster world)
- swappable CPU board if they had the same type of memory connection (both 939 and AM2 used 2x DDR2)
And for the record, Intel started this whole business with the "Slot" form factor on their Pentium 2/3/Celeron (all can connect the same way to 440BX chipset).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I recently build a new PC, based on an Asus motherboard which has UEFI, but there is no problem what so ever with running linux on it. ...
The build-in wifi works, USB3 works, BIOS is updatable with a USB key,
You just need to use a recent distro that has support for UEFI (Ubuntu & SteamOS both worked for me).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.