[clug] Linux mobo - good and cheap

Algis Kabaila akabaila at pcug.org.au
Fri Jan 9 00:09:53 GMT 2009


David,

I really do appreciate your well thought out reply and explanation.  I marked 
your email as "important" - it will save me a lot of googling around time.

Google is great, but if one does know very little about a subject, then it is 
always good to have advice from a "real" person to follow.  Some of the URL's 
that were mentioned, I had visited before and did revisit again, yet still 
found it difficult to understand what it was all about.  I do hope I don't 
irritate people by following their advice, often without much research.  I am 
aware of the complaint of the more experienced about the lack of research by 
the less experienced.

But we all had to learn from scratch.  It reminds me of a good dentist that I 
had when we lived in Sydney.  When I thanked him for the great work that he 
did, he just said: "I only did what others taught me!"

A big thank you to your patience,

OldAl.

On Tue, 6 Jan 2009 20:39:30 David Collett wrote:
> I'm late to this party and it sounds like you're on the right track
> already.
>
> Just wanted to give my support integrated intel video. I've been using
> integrated intel video for years now (945G, G965 and G31 chipsets) and
> reckon they are great. Specifically, I've been using cheap and
> easy-to-find gigabyte boards from the Canberra computer fair.
>
> They work 'out-of-the-box' and they do have 3D support which is plenty
> good enough for desktop bling (e.g. compiz) and the like (perhaps not
> good enough for games as noted).
>
> It also has good 2D support including basic video acceleration (xv). I
> use a 945G board in my mythtv box and it plays back HDTV just fine.
>
> As noted, many boards don't have DVI out (certainly mine don't, but
> perhaps newer ones do), however you *can* get DVI output by buying an
> "ADD2" riser board. It is a PCIe x16 card that sits in your x16 slot
> and adds a DVI output to the onboard video. Works with any intel mobos
> and should be easy to find online for about $25. Intel also support
> the new spec for dynamic monitor detection and reconfiguration
> ('xrandr' ?). I run a dual-monitor setup here with one monitor
> connected to the onboard VGA plug and a second on the ADD2 card DVI
> plug. It is trivial to configure dual-head with the latest distros
> which contain a gui for xrandr compliant drivers (e.g. ubuntu 8.10).
> The only bad thing I've encountered is that with my dual-head setup,
> compiz is disabled because the frame buffer width exceeds the limits
> of the DRI driver, see here for details:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/mesa/+bug/146859
>
> Finally, my gigabyte mobos all support suspend (and resume!) out of
> the box on recent distros (Ubuntu anyway).
>
> Of course YMMV, good luck,
>
> Dave
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Algis Kabaila <akabaila at pcug.org.au> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > A big "Thank You"  to all who responded to the enquiry, particularly to
> > ("in order of appearance"):
> > Mike Carden, Chris Smart, David Tulloh, Owen Cook, Daniel Pitman, Rainer
> > Klein, Rod Peters, Adam Jenkins.  A lot of information there!
> >
> > Just to underline something that I mentioned in my enquiry: On the amd64
> > box with a mobo with Nvidia chipset I do get the same "out of range"
> > result with the recent ubuntu as well as suse.
> >
> > To be fair, In another situation with an el cheapo Acer laptop, ubuntu
> > *did* have a better support for that Acer.  So, actually there is not
> > much to pick between distros.   I should also note that openSUSE10.3
> > works well with my amd64 box. I am writing with that box now and that is
> > one reason why I am so slow to test hardware on it.
> >
> > To sum it up in a sentence, for an old newbie it seems that Chris'
> > suggestion of mobo with Intel chipsets is a good starting point.  Also,
> > Rod's information of his experience with EAH3450 tells me that it is well
> > worth investigating. I would experiment with all suggestions, but the
> > time is catching up with me, so I need to select a subset.
> >
> > Thank you all again,
> >
> > OldAl.
> >
> > --
> > Dr Algis Kabaila
> > http://akabaila.pcug.org.au/StructuralAnalysis/
> > --
> > linux mailing list
> > linux at lists.samba.org
> > https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/linux



-- 
Dr Algis Kabaila
http://akabaila.pcug.org.au/StructuralAnalysis/


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