Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[slvrldy17]

Good news and bad news- all posts relate to the D945GCLF until pg.3 and after 10/24/08.

Tried booting Puppy in several forms with this mobo - this included Puppy 2.15CE, Wolfpup 1.00 (Puppy 3.01), and Puppy 4.0 "Dingo" - all will boot OK to a full desktop - no problem - but none will make a working network connection with the onboard LAN. All report finding/loading the "RealTek 8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver". In each case the network wizard says that it has found an "alive network" but using "auto DHCP" no connection is made. If any network savvy Puppy aficionado wants to tackle this let me know - this is one impressive little mobo - it is not listed as being linux compatible but boots Puppy just fine. Let me know what info you need and I'll try to post it.

[slvrldy17]

Some additional information - the onboard LAN for this board is the Realtek RTL8102EL - my suspicion is that this driver may not be in Puppy as it may be too new. Had the same problem working in Windows but at least the driver on the supplied driver CD yields a working connection there.

Thought of trying ndiswrapper with the Windows driver but since ndiswrapper needs a .inf file to work and I was unable to find such in the driver files from the Intel driver CD for this board this idea was a non starter.

Finally got a working network connection though - I had a USB connected network adapter that came from Comp USA sometime back in my "spares" pile and plugging it in and clicking the "Autoload USB" option in the network wizard produced a working connection using the rtl8150 driver on "eth1".

If the case you are using has the needed room there is a single pci expansion slot on this mobo - so a pci NIC card is a possibility - but the case I'm using doesn't allow for that as it is quite crowded inside.

Edit to add more information and news of a working result.

[slvrldy17]

Okay - spent some time doing further tests with the "Little Falls" board with the following results...

First the spec for the system I'm working with - Intel DG945GCLF motherboard , 2GB stick of PNY Optima RAM, Laptop/slim DVD burner on IDE bus, 160GB SATA laptop Hard drive, Morex 3777 case.

Using Puppy 2.15CE - boots up fine to a full desktop but the network wizard does not have the drivers for either the on board LAN or my USB network adapter. If someone wishes to post a link to either driver I'll do some more testing of the performance web wise. But I doubt it will be different from that of the 3.0 and 4.0 series Puppies.

Using Wolfpup 1.0 (3.01 based) - boots up perfect - detects the on board LAN and network wizard declares "success" with connection - but no connection with any browser or email client I tried. Detects the USB adapter and works fine with that. Hung on reboot when the on board LAN tried to connect. Went to "60 second" time out for DHCP and stayed there. Have had to remove driver for eth0 - the on board LAN driver in order to reliably reboot - but no other problems so far.

Puppy 4.0 Dingo - boots up OK and detects the USB adapter but did not try reboot with the driver for the on board LAN set up.

So far I'm having good results with this little board - for the price ($79.95) its hard to beat - its capable of booting/running full Windows Vista with Areo enabled so it should be good in linux if someone wants to play with various linux desktop/graphics packages.

[slvrldy17]

Some further fiddling with the "Little Falls" motherboard has produced an interesting problem. When booted with Puppy 2.15CE sound works out of the box - the Alsa mixer can be accessed using the "alsamixer" command in a terminal and sound appears to work normally.

When booted with either 3.01 based or 4.0 Puppy variants there is no sound and when "alsamixer" is typed in a terminal it returns a "command not found" message.

Have been trying out the methods in the thread by Tempestuous on setting up the Intel High Definition Audio Codec with no success so far - Has anyone else here run across this issue and if so what have you tried? What results? The model here is the ALC662 and is I believe the model "3stack-dig" for my setup.

For the moment it looks as if I've a choice between having a working net connection and having sound - I would be interested to hear from anyone else working with this board/codec to see if they have encountered this problem.

[raffy]

Have you tried ndiswrapper for the network wizard (use the Windows network driver)?

Breeezy of February 1 or later has an updated set of drivers for ALSA. You may want to try this for sound.

[slvrldy17]

Hi Raffy,

Was going to try ndiswrapper but was unable to find the .inf file needed to make it work on the Windows driver CD - it is likely there - but I haven't found it yet! Since the USB network adapter works for Wolfpup (which is 3.01 based) it hasn't been a high priority so far.

When time permits I'll give Breezy a shot - things at work have been quite hectic lately but will hopefully quiet down in the next month or so. I'll post the results when I get a chance to try it.

[snawathe]

i have purchased the mobo and facing the same problems i.e no sound no net connectivity, i have downloaded the zip file for linux driver from intel site and as per their instruction removed the r8139 ethernet driver but i am unable to make "clean modules" etc as in the readme file, can some body help me with that.. puppy 3.00 is my favourite distro. thanks in advance, surely if alsa works in 2.15ce why does it not work in 3.00? any answers?

[stlchuck]

If the enclosure you are using for the board has the room there is a PCI expansion slot on the board that should accept a generic 10/100 Network card or you could do as Alice did and try using a USB network connector. Either solution should be fairly cheap, in the $10 to 20 range for the generic PCI card. Probably the same price range for the USB device. Wish I could help you with the sound but I suspect that may be an issue with the Alsa version as some seem to work and others don't.

[tempestuous]

That Realtek LAN chip may, indeed, be too new to be supported by the r8169 module in Puppy 4.0.
I wouldn't waste time compiling a different driver for Puppy4.0 when Puppy4.1 is just about to be released. Puppy4.1 will have a very new kernel (2.6.25.10) and there's a fair chance that the newer LAN module will work.
Have either of you tried Puppy 4.1alpha4?

There's also a chance that the problem is not due to the LAN driver at all. I have no experience with the DG945GCLF, but I do have a D201GLY2 which requires the "acpi=off" boot parameter before its LAN interface will work under Puppy 3.1.
These miniITX Intel boards seem to have problems with Linux ACPI routines.

[slvrldy17]

Thank You Tempestuous!

Booting with the "acpi=off" boot parameter works like a charm for the 3.01 based Wolfpup 1 and likely will for others 3.01 based Puppies as well where gaining a working net connection with the on board LAN is concerned. Now, all I have to do is remember what file the command gets placed in so that it happens automatically when booting up. I'm running Wolfpup on this box as a live CD rather than installed to the hard drive as I really don't want to deal with setting up a dual boot with Windows.

Now if we can come up with an equally simple fix for the sound problem we'll have a winner here. When the command "alsamixer" is put in a terminal the error message comes back "alsamixer: function snd_mixer_load failed: Invalid argument" - as time permits I'll do some more testing using the info in your thread on setting up Intel High definition audio - I've identified the ALC662 codec and if I'm reading the specs correctly it should be a "3stack-dig" parameter. Any ideas or guidance welcome.

[tempestuous]

Actually the ACPI fix for the D201GLY was first reported by forum member geoff.l -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=187906#187906
Like 99% of all modern motherboards the D201GLY does support ACPI, so strictly speaking, it's not correct practice to disable the ACPI features of the Linux kernel.
It would be better practice to use a different boot parameter which affects resource handling without totally disabling ACPI, such as -
pci=biosirq
acpi=noirq
acpi=strict
pci=nosort
irqpoll
routeirq

I have been too lazy to try these myself.
There's a chance that one of these boot parameters might magically bring the sound to life, too?

[slvrldy17]

Thank You again Tempestuous,

I'll run some more tests with booting Wolfpup using your suggestions over the next few days as time permits and post the results here.

Snawathe,

Hang in there - using the "acpi=off" boot parameter works for getting a net connection and if any of forum member Tempestuous's suggested refinements (see above post) work I'll post that here. As for sound - I'm still working on that and when something works I'll post that as well.

[slvrldy17]

[snawathe]

thankx for the solution. sorry i have been a little late in answering but i was busy conf ubuntu on the MOBO againg with little results, puppy works fine modifed booting but still no sound with alsa mixer.will try with clean install and will be back with results.
thank you once again

[slvrldy17]

Per request of a couple of forum users I tried Barry's newly released Dingo Alpha 5 with mixed results - what follows is the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In all cases Dingo 4.1 A5 was run in RAM only - I didn't want to mess up a working setup of the 3.01 based Wolfpup.

The Good -

Boots up with no problems and provided the Alsa Wizard is run first sound works "out of the box". Alsa Mixer can be brought up in a terminal but has little or no effect on volume which is a bit weak - was necessary to turn speaker volume up to max on the Bose Companion 2 speakers to get decent sound. Still, an improvement over the 3.01 based Puppies. Was impressed with how mounting the CD/DVD drive with a disc in it starts Gxine and both music CD's and Movie DVD's will play - at least in a short test - did not test running for long periods or changing from full to normal screen with a DVD. Nor did I try playing WMA files from the NTFS partition. If such a test is needed/wanted let me know and I'll try it as time permits.

The Bad -

Network connection with the on board LAN - network wizard reports a "live" connection and success with auto DHCP but browser will not connect to the net. Tried using boot parameters "acpi=off" "irqpoll" and routeirq" that worked in the 3.01 based Wolfpup with no luck.

The Ugly -

The only way to get a working net connection was to use a USB connected ethernet adapter which was recognized as "eth 1" and and DHCP works OK with it - browser connects to the net with no problem when connection is done this way.

Overall, I'm impressed - having working sound is a major plus - but getting a working net connection is still a problem - call it a half step back as using boot parameters had no effect like in the 3.01 series.

If If anyone wants to work with the network problem let me know what info you need and I'll try to post it here.