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The serverworks chipsets were used in motherboards in the late P3 era which, while a bit old, are still quite usable for many purposes. They do have some quirks that make them difficult to setup with Ubuntu (5.4 and 5.10). Notes towards getting past these issues follow.

These notes are based on my experiences with a Supermicro 370DER motherboard in a 1U rack server case (called 6010H as a system). It has on-board sound and video (Rage XL), as well as Adaptec's U160 controller. I've disabled the SCSI as the cost and capacity of 1" SCSI drives make them not so suitable for my application, and certainly for use before I'm sure I even can use the hardware. One thing I want to use it for is to try the new support (in Breezy) for the LTSP thin client scheme, since with 2G of RAM and a dual 1GHz P3 configuration it ought to support a few terminals with ease.

So it's setup with a spare 40G IDE drive, and the install seems to go well until you get to the 2nd stage, where the boot hung, apparently while setting up hotplug support. After trying several dead ends, I found that Sarge could install and boot into the system using a 2.4 kernel. Disabling both hotplug and hotplug-net in init.d (by adding exit 0 at the top of each), the boot could proceed further. Now it hung, as it had in an attempted installation of Sarge with a 2.6 kernel, after reporting that AGP was being initialized. I eventually stumbled across the noagp boot option, and (in conjunction with acpi=off, which may or may not have been necessary, but was suggested by a number of the trouble reports I had found), finally got to finish the Breezy installation. (I had to switch the NIC's setup from being managed by hotplug to a more conventional auto setting in /etc/network/interfaces, of course.)

At this point I installed kernel-package and friends and built a vanilla 2.6.13.4 kernel tailored to this system, and that boots fine without requiring the added boot options. However, without ACPI, I don't seem to be able to shutdown to power off, which is a bit of a nuisance.

interim update: Somewhere along the way I removed the acpi=off and found that it didn't seem to hurt anything, so now it can shutdown normally. I just got done trying the server edition of Breezy on this cranky old thing. It installed and got as far as the usual hotplug hang without any boot options (aside from http_proxy, which shouldn't matter). I'm not sure that's any different than before.

- MartinManey