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• I have Edgy installed on this board and every thing works exceptionally well. But for earlier versions there is problem with the PCI express card. I had to use "linux pci=nommconf" using a text based install cd to install them. Hope it's useful, Kamesh

I have an Intel D946GZIS motherboard. I tried to install Ubuntu 5.10, Ubuntu 6.06, and gNewSense on this system. In all three cases, the bootup failed with default kernel options.

I discovered that kernel options NOAPIC and ACPI=OFF sufficed to boot up without hanging the kernel.

The Ubuntu distributions tried to load the X.Org driver for the onboard Intel framebuffer, but that driver only works for earlier versions of this series of Intel motherboards. Specifically, the i810 video driver is only good for Intel video chipsets up through 945, and fails with the 946 chipset. The gNewSense distro declined to configure the i810 driver and instead configured xorg.conf to use the generic VESA driver, which worked to bring up the GUI desktop. I was able to bring up the X-Server in Ubuntu by manually editing xorg.conf to use the generic VESA driver instead of i810.

The gNewSense distro failed to initialize the onboard PRO 10/100 ethernet chip. The Ubuntu distributions (which use the same eepro100.ko driver) successfully brought up the ethernet interface.

The audio came up with a generic driver.

There is a driver package at Intel's web site for this series of motherboards, which includes components for updating both the audio and video drivers. Of these, two of the audio components were helpful, while one conflicted with a newer package already present in Ubuntu. Using just the two helpful components, the custom audio features became available, as revealed by alsamixer and the Gnome volume control.

Intel's video driver package does not include precompiled modules for current kernels, so it tries to compile them. The compilation failed, for reasons beyond my competence to diagnose. I was obliged to continue using the generic VESA driver for now. Eventually, I expect the folks at X.Org to update the i810 drivers to work with the new 946 chipsets.

--Moulton

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