15 August 2006 Thank-you to everyone who took the time to report their user-experience with the custom CD. It is nice to receive some positive feedback. In addition to the symbolic link fix below, some people noted that setting their vt8251 southbridge to access the hard drive in AHCI mode (this is done in BIOS) solved some install problems. Note that Windows XP does not seem to like AHCI mode, so this might be inconvenient for any dual-booters out there. (My vt8251 is set to SATA mode and it works fine; however, I am using BIOS verion 0503. See the link below to the discussion in the Ubuntuforums for more info.) On 10 Aug 2006, an official update to Dapper Drake was released. Kubuntu 6.06.1 LTS can now be downloaded from http://www.kubuntu.org (similarly for Ubuntu). With this update, the vt8251 problem seems to be solved. Although I have not tried the install process yet, the 6.06.1 live installer was able to read my sata drive [update: Kubuntu 6.06.1 LTS works fine on my machine; the install process completed without a hitch]. Another user reported success with the vt8251 on the Ubuntu forums: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=196171 So I now recommend that you **do not** download my custom CD. Instead, get yourself a copy of the official Kubuntu or Ubuntu 6.06.1 iso. If you use the official release, you can later purchase technical support from Canonical if you want; using my custom CD disqualifies you from tech support. -James A B C gmail com where A is "muir" B is "james" C is "a+kubuntu" %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% 19 July 2006 I've received a few reports from people who were able to get linux running on their system using the custom CD. Some people reported problems with modules not being loaded/found when the system starts up. If your mouse does not work, this could be a symptom of missing modules. If you create the following symbolic link, it may help: $ sudo ln --symbolic /lib/modules/2.6.17.3+jm /lib/modules/2.6.17.3jm Note that if you aren't able to log into KDE, then reboot into single user mode (i.e. in the grub menu, select "recovery mode"). -James %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% 13 July 2006 A number of people have downloaded the iso but, so far, there haven't been any reports of success or failure in the Ubuntu or VIA forums. These are good places to post a message since others can benefit from your comments. If you give the CD a try, could you please report on how it worked for you? Thanks! -James %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% 9 July 2006 The Kubuntu 6.06 live CD (Dapper Drake, amd64-bit version) was modified by me (jamuir) to support sata drives controlled by via's infamous vt8251 southbridge. The resulting iso file is da3a4031b9ecec8a92ea47b6bc60567c kubuntu6.06+vt8251.iso This was accomplished by replacing the stock Dapper kernel, 2.6.15-23-amd64-generic, on the live CD with a custom one, 2.6.17.3+jm. The custom kernel uses bjacques' 2.6.17 vt8251 patch, which is included (or will be soon included) in the 2.6.18 kernel. When I built this custom kernel, I also applied patches to enable squashfs and unionfs support -- these filesystems are required by "casper", the collection of scripts used to run the live cd ("casper" is an Ubuntu package). If you download and burn the iso, you will find a directory /vt8251 on the CD which contains a .deb package containing the custom kernel: vt8251/ vt8251/kernel-image-2.6.17.3+jm_10.00.Custom_amd64.deb vt8251/README It took me many iterations to learn how to update the stock kernel on the live cd with my custom one (it is a little more involved than just replacing one file with another). Despite this long struggle, I stuck with it because, i) I needed a live CD to use as a rescue CD for my system, ii) I wanted to learn how to do it, and iii) I knew there were many other would-be linux users who would benefit from this live CD. I wish someone had created a live cd like this back in November 2005, which is when I bought my amd64 box and sata drive. I hope you benefit from the time I invested in this project. However, having said that, keep the following in mind: *** USE THIS CD AT YOUR OWN RISK *** ----------------------------- Note: Once you have the iso burned and you boot from it, the "Kubuntu" logo appears with a menu of boot choices. Probably you will pick the first choice. Before you do so, I suggest you press "F6" and delete the last two parameters, "quiet splash", passed to the kernel. The reason is because, when the custom kernel boots, it does not display the splash page corectly, so you won't see anything but a black screen until Xorg and KDE start up. See the picture ./boot-options.png for an illustration of what I mean. ----------------------------- Info on the linux vt8251 saga: http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=68455&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=71754&enterthread=y (these are threads in the "linux" area of the VIA forums) -James ("jamuir" on the Ubuntu and VIA forums) keywords: asus a8v-mx, sata, vt8251, linux, amd64, live cd, ubuntu, kubuntu.