Installing Debian on an Asus A7V333 Motherboard

If you have any comments about this document, please contact me at [email protected].

This document is intended to help the average user install Debian on their Asus A7V333-based computer. At the time of writing, the current release (stable) version of Debian is 3.0r2, a.k.a. "woody", and the testing version is codenamed "sarge". The A7V333 is a relatively new motherboard, and is not well supported in woody. I recommend running sarge instead, and this document will walk you through installing the sarge distribution.

If you're intending to use your A7V333 machine as a server, however, you may be inclined to stick to woody since it is a more stable operating system. I'll offer a few pointers for you in this case, but you'll be more on your own.

As the owner of an A7V333, there are two major problems that you will have when you try to install Debian.

The onboard Promise PDC20276 RAID controller is not supported by the Linux kernels that come with woody. In fact, any hard drives you have attached to the RAID connectors on the motherboard will not even be detected when you attempt to install Debian. If you don't have the RAID option on your motherboard then you probably don't need this document.
The VIA chipset on the A7V333 is not supported by the Linux kernels supplied with woody. Even if you're able to get Debian installed, you'll still encounter various problems with PCI devices because of this lack of support.

To get around the first problem, we need to specifically tell the linux kernel how to find the hard drives attached to the RAID connectors, and aditionally make use of the ATA RAID driver that is compiled into the newer Debian Linux kernels. This is easy enough and we can do this using only the default install CD for woody.

The second problem throws a wrench in the works, however. You'll need to upgrade your kernel (to at least version 2.4.19) to get support for the onboard VIA chipset. On my system, this leaves me in a bit of a catch-22, however. The lack of support for the VIA chipset renders my network adapter unusable. But in order to upgrade the kernel, I'd generally like to use the internet to download the newer kernel images or sources! The solution that I suggest is downloading both the install CD for woody, and the install CD for sarge, during your preparation. We'll first install woody from CD, and then immediately upgrade to sarge using the sarge CD.

Why not just install sarge directly? Well, that seems like a logical route. Unfortunately, the sarge installer appears to hang on the A7V333 (if you've got it working, please let me know!). Thus, the more circuitous route of installing woody and then upgrading to sarge is necessary.

There is already some great documentation available for new users intending to install Debian. Rather than replacing that documentation, I've written the rest of this document to be an accompaniment to the installation manual. By all means, start out by reading through the installation manual. *** FIX *** When you get to the appropriately marked sections, flip to this document to see my notes that are specific to the A7V333.

[3.1]

We'll have another significant step at the end of this list, which is to upgrade from woody to sarge.

[3.3.2]

In addition to the items mentioned here, we need four memory addresses that correspong to the PDC20276 RAID controller. Getting this information is simple enough, just follow these steps:

Reboot your computer, and when you see the MBFastTrak133 BIOS screen appear, press CTRL-F to enter the FastBuild Utility.
Once in the FastBuild Utility, press "6" for "Controller Configuration".
On the screen that appears, there should be two lines of infomation in the main display, corresponding to channel 1 and channel 2 of your RAID controller. We need the I/O Address for each channel. We'll call these addresses RAID0(a) and RAID1(a). (Be careful not to get confused, RAID0 corresponds to channel 1, and RAID1 corresponds to channel 2). On my machine RAID0(a) is 0xB400, and RAID1(a) is 0xA800. (Note the use of the "0x" prefix in front of the addresses, which commonly indicates that the addresses are in hexadecimal.)
Now we need to do a little hexadecimal arithmetic to get the other two necessary addresses. I'd recommend a good hex calculator (the calculator that comes with all Windows versions is great). Subtract 0x03FE from the RAID0(a) address to obtain a new address which we'll call RAID0(b). Similary, subtract 0x03FE from the RAID1(a) address to obtain the RAID1(b) address. In my case, RAID0(b) is 0xB002, and RAID1(b) is 0xA402.

[3.7]

I've never installed Debian from another Linux disribution, so I cannot provide a guide for doing this with the A7V333. If you've already got another Linux disribution installed, however, no doubt you are experienced enough that you can extract the needed information from this document.

[4.1]

When choosing your installation medium, keep in mind that you likely won't have internet access from within woody. This is because the woody kernel doesn't properly support the VIA chipset on the A7V333, and this may render your network adapter unusable within woody. Without internet access, the "net" installation methods will not work.

I recommend getting a complete copy of the Debian CD 1. This is unfortunate (a lot of bandwidth used to get the CD), since we'll immediately be upgrading to sarge, but it's a necessary evil. Please use jigdo (*** FIX *** add address here) if you can. Also, while you're at it, use jigdo to build yourself an image of Sarge CD 1 for sarge, as well. You'll need it shortly when we upgrade from woody to sarge.

[4.2.2]

There is no real choice here for A7V333 owners. The only flavour that supports the PDC20276 RAID controller is "bf2.4", so you must use that flavour.

[5.1]

The boot parameters are critical for getting Debian to use and recognize your hard drive array connected to the PDC20276. You need the memory addresses that were recorded in section 3.3.2. You'll need to use these two boot parameters to install on your RAID array:

ide2=[RAID0(a)],[RAID0(b)]
ide3=[RAID1(a)],[RAID1(b)]

For example, to get Debian installed on my machine, I needed to supply the boot parameters "ide2=0xb400,0xb002 ide3=0xa800,0xa402" to the boot prompt at startup. Be sure to use lower case.

After running the "Make System Bootable" step of the installation process, and BEFORE REBOOTING (!), you need to update the LILO paramters in lilo.conf so that LILO can properly boot from your RAID array. Follow these steps:

When you get to the "Reboot the System" step, DON'T DO IT! Your system will not boot if you're intending to boot from the RAID array. If you don't intend to boot from the RAID array, you can skip steps 4 and 5.
Instead of rebooting, press ALT-F2 (use the ALT key on the left side of the keyboard only) and then press ENTER to get to a shell.
Enter "nano-tiny /target/etc/lilo.conf" to edit the lilo.conf file.
Find the two commented out entries near the top of the file that are "disk=/dev/sda" followed immediately by "bios=0x80".
Uncomment those two lines. Change the first one so that it reads "disk=/dev/ataraid/d0". The second one should remain as "bios=0x80" (indented from the line above). *** FIX *** You only need to to this if your RAID array is configured as the boot device.
Scroll down a few pages until you find the commented out line that has the 'append=""' parameter. Uncomment this line and edit it so that it contains the two IDE boot parameters that we needed to add to the original boot prompt during installation. My lilo.conf says (after I've added the parameters):

append="ide2=0xb400,0xb002 ide3=0xa800,0xa402"
Now scroll down to the bottom of the file. If you instructed the installation program to add boot entries for any other operating systems on your hard drive, you will probably find duplicate "other=..." entries here for those operating systems. For each operating system, there will be an entry on /dev/ataraid/d0, and another will be on /dev/hde. Delete all the entries the refer to /dev/hde, and leave only the /dev/ataraid/d0 entries.

NOTE: Generally, you can refer to the two hard drives that compose your RAID array as /dev/hde and /dev/hdg. DO NOT EVER DO THIS. You do not want to access the drives individually, and you may lose everything if you do so. Only refer to the drives through the RAID device /dev/ataraid/d0.
Now, save your changes (press CTRL-O and ENTER to accept the filename "/target/etc/lilo.conf"). Press CTRL-X to exit the editor.
At the command prompt, enter "lilo" to have LILO rewrite the boot sector with the updated parameters.
Type "exit" and press ALT-F1 to return the the installation script.

Now you can continue with the installation script and reboot the system. If everything has gone well then the LILO boot screen will appear and you'll be able to boot Debian directly from your hard drive.

When you've rebooted, the installation process will continue. Continue with the installation, but keep in mind that networking probably won't work for you yet, so use the CDROM installation method to get woody installed.

When asked, "Use security updates from security.debian.org", say "NO", since networking does not yet work.

Install only a minimal woody system. When asked to use tasksel or dselect, say "NO". Once your minimal woody system is installed, log in as root and we can begin the upgrade process to get sarge installed.

After you log in as root, enter "apt-cdrom add" at the command prompt. When prompted to put in a CD, put your sarge CD in the drive and press enter, and the CD will quickly be scanned. Next, at the command prompt, enter "apt-get update" and then "apt-get dist-upgrade" to start the upgrade process. During the install, you'll be prompted about changing lilo.conf. Ignore/skip those changes for the moment, as I'll walk you through the necessary changes in a minute. When asked if you'd like to install a package maintainer's configuration or retain your current configuration, always answer 'Y' to use the new configuration from the package maintainer. We haven't had long enough to make any worthwhile configuration changes to the system yet!

When I did the dist-upgrade, I ended up with a couple of errors upgrading "exim" and "mailx". These didn't pose any real problem, and I simply cleaned them up later on using dselect.

When the upgrade is complete, you should upgrade your kernel to a newer version that supports the VIA chipset. Anything after 2.4.19 should suffice. To upgrade to the latest 2.4 kernel compiled for AMD processors, use this command:

apt-get install kernel-image-2.4-k7

You'll receive a warning about initrd changes needed in lilo.conf. Ignore them for now; we'll get to the lilo.conf changes next. In response to some of the questions you'll get:

Do NOT stop installing the new kernel (by default it will stop because you need to change lilo.conf).
DO install the /initrd.img symbolic link (it does this by default)
Do NOT update your boot block from lilo.conf (we haven't made the necessary changes to lilo.conf yet).
Do NOT wipe out your old LILO configuration

After the new packages are installed, you'll need to update lilo.conf again. First, let's find the linux devices that correspond to the two individual drives in your RAID array. They are likely /dev/hde and /dev/hdg if you've set your BIOS to boot from the RAID array. But, to but sure, you can "cat /proc/ide/hde/model" and "cat /proc/ide/hdg/model" to see if the drive model numbers match what you expect. Also, "cat /proc/ide/hde/capacity" and "cat /proc/ide/hdg /capacity" should report the total size of your RAID array (not the capacity of the individual drives). Once your satisfied that your which devices are your RAID drives, we can update lilo.conf:

Enter "nano /etc/lilo.conf" to update your lilo.conf file.
Find the two-line entry we made starting with "disk=/dev/atariad/d0" followed by "bios=0x80".
Immediately above these two lines, you need to add two new disk entries (replace /dev/hde and /dev/hdg with the appropriate drives that correspond to your RAID array):
```
	disk=/dev/hde
	    inaccessible

	disk=/dev/hdg
	    inaccessible
```
Now scroll down a bit further and find the line with "install=/boot/boot-menu.b". Replace this with "install=menu".
Scroll down a bit more and find the "image=/vmlinuz" entry. It should have a few options indented on the lines below it (e.g. "label=Linux" and "read-only"). Add a new option, "initrd=/initrd.img" after all the other options.
NOTE: If you install a newer kernel at some later point in time, you'll need to update the "image=/vmlinuz.old" entry and add an *** FIX ***
Press CTRL-O to save the /etc/lilo.conf file, and then CTRL-X to exit.
At the command prompt, enter "lilo" to update your boot record with the new parameters.

When your LILO changes are finished and the boot block is updated, type "reboot" to restart your new sarge system.

When the system has rebooted, log in as root again. Now we need to get networking set up. If you're like me, you're network adapter is supported by a standard kernel module. All you need to do is enter "modconf" at the command line and install the module from the kernel/drivers/net set of modules. You're more or less on your own here, good luck!

With your network adapter module now installed, you can configure the network. Again, you're mostly on your own here. For me, all I need to do is modify /etc/network/interfaces to have these three lines:


	auto lo eth0
	iface lo inet loopback
	iface eth0 inet dhcp

With these changes, running "ifup eth0" enables my network connection, and I'm in business!

Once your network connection is up, you can modify /etc/apt/sources.list to get packages from a Debian nearby mirror (*** FIX ***). Here's what my sources.list file looks like: *** FIX ***

With your changes to sources.list finished, you can now run dselect to install the remaining important and standard system packages for sarge, and remove any obsolete woody packages.

To enable sound support for the onboard C-Media sound chip, run "modconf" and scroll down to the kernel/drivers/sound section, and press enter. You'll get a list of various sound cards supported under Linux; scroll down to the "cmpci" entry and press enter to install the sound module. You do not need any parameters.

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