Mandrake 8.1 on a K7S5A (sis735) ??

[ashyukun]

Has anyone gotten the on-board sound and networking on a K7S5A (or any other sis-735 chipset based motherboard) working using Mandrake 8.1 (or other distros)? When I run through the install, the sis900 network card is detected, but it doesn't seem to be able to see or use my router to access the network (with my old motherboard/NIC it worked without any additional fiddling after the initial install), and the 7012 sound card doesn't seem to want to work either. If anyone else has gotten this setup working or has suggestions on how to go about getting it to work, I'd definitely appreciate hearing about it. Thanks!

[bdg1983]

Did you configure setup a static address or dhcp? Gateway and dns servers setup?

What does ifconfig show?

[Molecule Man]

The sound uses the Trident module, I don't know anymore than that. The SIS900, just works for me, ECS K7S5A, it is what I am using right now for my dsl, and I have a DLINK DFE530tx+ for NAT connection to my notebook.

[ashyukun]

My setup runs on DHCP using a SMP broadband router that is connected up to my cable modem on the @home network. I didn't have any gateway or DNS servers specified in netconf, but I added the DNS server that is listed in my Win98 winipcfg but not a gateway (with no change in the it working).

Without trying to fiddle with netconf, ifconfig only shows the loopback device. An ifconfig eth0 does show information, but it doesn't look like it is getting the DHCP connection. In starting up, I had been noticing that it appeared that the startup was hanging on initializing the loopback device- after manually running the network start command (/etc/rc3.d/<I forget>/S10network start) I was able to tell that it was in fact hanging on initializing eth0, and that it errored out saying it could not get the IP information it needed.

I did -sort of- get the sound working yesterday using the demo of OSS... but it sounds like complete crep (it must not be Scottish...). Both MP3s and wave files just sound horrid, like something isn't set right. I did notice that in the initial setup of OSS it gave a warning that the 7012 sound card was sharing an IRQ with something else, but I couldn't find anything in the BIOS to re-assign the IRQs. Could this be what was causing the horrid sound quality?

All told, I'm much more interested in getting the network running than the sound- if I just can't get the sound working properly with the on-board, I have a spare sound card that I know will work (Aureal A3D) that I can use. Thanks!

[bdg1983]

If ifconfig does not show eth0, then you will need to try and load the module for the sis900.

Check you logfile in /var/log/messages to see if there are any error messages about the module not loading etc.

[ashyukun]

I've run modprobe sis900, and the module should be installed and running (theoretically), and I don't get any errors when installing it. lsmod shows the sis900 module as installed....

[bdg1983]

Mandrake 8.1 should have all kinds of gui networking configuration tools you can use to setup dhcp, gateway, dns etc. Give those a try.

[ashyukun]

I've actually tried just about everything that I can think of with the gui tools (namely netconf, both in and out of X)- I've tried the network card set up exactly as HardDrake picked it up (netmask 255.255.255.0; device eth0; module sis900; using DHCP for IP resolution) and with some changes (using the tulip module instead of sis900 {no dice, it wouldn't install the module because the hardware didn't match} and deleting the netmask). I probably haven't tried every possible combination of things that I could change, but the only time that a network start didn't yield a failure on loading eth0 was when I set the gateway to the admin I.P. of my SMP router. It then brought (in theory) eth0 up (except it called it route eth0 instead of device eth0), but I still couldn't ping anything.

Molecule Man, what did you have to do to get your network card running? Are you running MDK8.1? And if so, did it automatically configure the card properly, or did you have to fiddle with it? I have to figure I'm doing something basic wrong, but for the life of me I can't figure out why. I'd be a bit less frustrated (or my frustration would be directed in a different direction, at least) if I were having the same problems with the network in my Windows boot on the same computer, but it keeps chugging along largely without missing a beat (except for last night, when I turned off PnP OS and ACPI in the BIOS, and had to re-install Windoze to make it happy). :(

[Molecule Man]

I did nothing special. I have an adsl line and just used the draknet to set it up. And Yes, I have used both MDK 8.0 and 8.1.

[sarah31]

Out of curiousity, how do you like the SiS735 chipset? I have been very tempted lately to buy a board with this chipset. ECS has one for very cheap where I shop. The benchmarks for this chipset are impressive.

[Molecule Man]

Works great for me.

[sarah31]

:cool: