x9200 wrote:Centos 6.3 on D2500CCE = not a good idea, unless you have plenty of time but what you are going to end up with defies the purpose of running an enterprise Linux. Many important components does not work out of box like lm_sensors (and their site is down to get a patch for the drivers). Even such basic things like convincing NIC to go Gbite has to be manually tweaked. Many popular packages not available. Also SSD performs half of its capability out of box.
I eventually ended up using Ubuntu server 12.04.1 LTS and at this point I am only still struggling with the graphics.
Hmm, that is a little dissapointing. CentOS does seem to be a little behind the other Linux distros but for it to be pretty unworkable on these boards is surprising. Did you give Fedora a go as it tends to be a lot more up to date.
Seems that the video driver provided by the video chipset manufacturer is quite poor for Linux but there have abeen a couple of updates with suggestions of another coming (how true or good quality is another matter).
There is a long thread (10 pages) on the Intel support communities
here which discusses various patches and results. There is also a link to an update that puts all the Cedarview PCI device details in if they are not already included in a distro. There is another one
here about disabling the LVDS video connection on install which has been causing some people issues as it is detected as connected even after BIOS disable.
The network issue is very supprising as the network chipsets are standard well used Intel ones. I tend to manually set my network up on each install as I dislike the mess Network Mananger usually makes of it. I have never seen network links based on these chipsets default to lower than GbE speeds though but then have not tried with this particular board.
I will try having a look with my D2700MUD at home as it uses the same chipsets and see what happens.
On a side note, as much as some of us dislike it, Windows Home Server works out of the box excluding the video drivers (WHS 2011 is 64bit and these boards have no official 64bit support). For video defaulting to standard vga works fine for a server. For a desktop machine, Windows 7 32bit should also work fine including the video drivers).
Intel are set to release a new gen of server targeted Atom chips next year sometime but details are sketchy at this time. A little info has leaked out though like the report
here.
RB
Without dialogues, if you tell them you want something real bad, you will get it real bad.