This board in general is not a good Linux board. It was purchased with Windows in mind. Which in the end turned out to be something of a negative, as three of the five people who got them wanted a Linux-something installed. Two of us have gotten it working, and the third may come around once I'm done dorking with my setup.
There are two big areas that cause problems with this board:
On the MAIN page in BIOS there is a sub-menu for IDE Configuration. You want to set 'Configure SATA as' to IDE. Don't use ACHI, so far only Vista can use ACHI right there. Linux will eventually support it. (and if you're reading this article two years from now, Linux probably has figured it out. Google harder.)
The second setting is on the ADVANCED menu, in the OnBoard Devices Configuration sub-menu. Set 'JMicron Controller Mode' to ACHI. That's right, ACHI. Not IDE. This allows the PATA optical devices to be detectable. This looks counter intuitive, but this is what seems to work.
Now that you've done that, you have put the shiny DVD into the optical drive and booted from it. You hit 'install from DVD' on the front screen, and.... it bombs, unable to detect the media.
That's because 10.2 isn't quite smart enough yet to detect it. You can force the issue by putting the following line on the "Boot Options" line on the front screen:
This tells the kernel to force-load the JMICRON driver. This allows the kernel to locate the DVD drive with which it'll continue the installation process.
Now comes the harder problem, the kernel shipped with 10.2 Goldmaster will hard lock the P5B. There is a work-around which you can find in Bug 229365.
[revised 12/21/2006]
Update 4/2/2007:
Turns out there have been some key problems in the Linux kernel relating to this particular P965 chipset. From a bug I reported a few weeks ago:
There are two big areas that cause problems with this board:
- The chipset, Intel 965G, has no native PATA support so ASUS attached a JMicron PATA controller. The JMicron PATA controllers are broken in all but the newest kernels (2.6.18 or newer). There is a limp-mode for 2.6.16 and older that can work (google all-generic-ide). This is a b-i-g problem when you consider almost all Optical drives are still PATA.
- The kernel included with the Goldmaster media (2.6.18.2-34) locks up the install hard. The cause of which is, as of this writing, unknown [Update: the kernel falsly detects AGP, which is the source of the lock, using the boot option "agp=off" may bypass this detection]. This will probably change when they remaster the install media later on.
On the MAIN page in BIOS there is a sub-menu for IDE Configuration. You want to set 'Configure SATA as' to IDE. Don't use ACHI, so far only Vista can use ACHI right there. Linux will eventually support it. (and if you're reading this article two years from now, Linux probably has figured it out. Google harder.)
The second setting is on the ADVANCED menu, in the OnBoard Devices Configuration sub-menu. Set 'JMicron Controller Mode' to ACHI. That's right, ACHI. Not IDE. This allows the PATA optical devices to be detectable. This looks counter intuitive, but this is what seems to work.
Now that you've done that, you have put the shiny DVD into the optical drive and booted from it. You hit 'install from DVD' on the front screen, and.... it bombs, unable to detect the media.
That's because 10.2 isn't quite smart enough yet to detect it. You can force the issue by putting the following line on the "Boot Options" line on the front screen:
insmod=pata_jmicronThis tells the kernel to force-load the JMICRON driver. This allows the kernel to locate the DVD drive with which it'll continue the installation process.
Now comes the harder problem, the kernel shipped with 10.2 Goldmaster will hard lock the P5B. There is a work-around which you can find in Bug 229365.
- When the install gets to the 'now we will reboot your machine', click SKIP.
- [Control]+[Alt]+[F5] to get to a shell
- cd to /mnt/etc/
- vi modprobe.conf.local
- Append this text to the file "blacklist intel_agp"
- Save the file
- Reboot
[revised 12/21/2006]
Update 4/2/2007:
Turns out there have been some key problems in the Linux kernel relating to this particular P965 chipset. From a bug I reported a few weeks ago:
Looking at the lspci output I get the understanding thatWhich is a long way of saying that if Intel AGP is loaded, either compiled in or falsely loaded due to a bad detection by the kernel, it'll have problems. The kernel falsely detects an integrated graphics controller and attempts to load agp_gart, which if loaded does Bad Things. It looks like the openSUSE guys are now aware of this problem, so we may have a new kernel in the not too distant future to fix this. Or perhaps this is just on the list for 10.3 when it comes out. Don't know yet.
intel-agp shouldn't initialize at all - there's not Intel Integrated Graphics
controller. The code in intel-agp, however, blindly assumes an 845 if there's a
host bridge with no matching IG (in agp_intel_probe()).
First,turn South Bridge Intel ICH8R and Jmicron JMB 363 into AHCI mode.Second,you have two options to get openSUSE 10.2running on ASUS P5B Deluxe.Option 1.Utilize SATA Optical Drive attached to Intel's ICH8R to install openSUSE 10.2 without any trouble.Option 2.Utilize IDE Optical Drive attached to Jmicron's PATA port.Then proceed as follows:-Boot from the openSUSE DVD. Get a messsage the CD drive is lost. Press Enter to get past the error message, then choose your language in the following screen. That will bring you to the main menu. Use the down arrow key to select the Kernel Modules option and press Enter. In the next screen press Enter again to select the default option for IDE/RAID/SCSI Modules. In the long list that follows, find both the JMicron and the Generic IDE drivers, select them, press Enter, then press Enter again when you're asked for special options to pass to them. You will have to do this twice -- one time for each driver. When you return to the kernel module screen, use the Tab or arrow keys to select Back, and press Enter. That should put you back into the Main Menu. Now select the option for Start Installation or System and press Enter, then select Start Installation or Update and press Enter, and lastly select the CD-ROM as the source and press Enter. The normal graphical installation procedure will commence.References.1.http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/60/
Author states:-Don't use ACHI, so far only Vista can use ACHI right there. Linux will eventually support it.Please,view:-http://www.codemonkeyx.net/node/22Regarding Setting up AHCI on P965 Motherboards
Well there is still a particular problem with this board.When trying to install a dualboot -after reboot GRUB gives an error code 21 if you have an IDE disk attached.This issue is not resolved and a mayor pain.There are lots of comments regarding this issues - but in fact it is unsolved.
> after reboot GRUB gives an error > code 21 if you have an IDE disk > attached.> This issue is not resolved and a > mayor pain.I had the a very similar problem on an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe board with Ubuntu 7.04 (couldn't get openSUSE to finish loading the LiveDVD at all).I have 2 IDE HDs, an IDE CDROM and and IDE DVD. Windows XP is on the master hard drive, Linux on the slave.I worked around it by :1- Requesting the installer install GRUB on /dev/sdc so that it actually installed it in the master boot record on the drive where XP is installed. (You'll see why I think this happens in a moment.)2- Changing the hard drive mappings in Device.map as follows: (hd0) /dev/sda --> (hd0) /dev/sdc(hd1) /dev/sdb --> (hd1) /dev/sdb(hd2) /dev/sdc --> (hd2) /dev/sdaI'm not sure what the installer saw as hd2, but it was only 373 kb of ram (BIOS flash memory ???)3- Changing the references to (hd2,0) in the menu.1st file to (hd0,0)What I concluded from this is that the funky JMicron controller confuses the divice mapping performed by installers (openSUSE and Ubuntu would be just two examples). This is why you're getting a "disk does not exist error" on reboot (error 21). Flip your device mappings around to see if this helps. I used an ext2 driver for Windows to access the ext3 drive Linux was installed on, and emacs for Windows to do the editing on the menu.1st and device.map files. Gilbert