July 09, 2013: replacement of an ECS AMD690VM-FMH motherboard by an ASRock N68C-GS FX one
Everything is OK, except the CPU fan at maximum speed all the time. It has been solved by enabling “CPU fan control” in the BIOS, and setting a suitable mid-value speed for the fan (5 in a range of 1 to 9).
In KDE (during the boot procedure of KDE!), I get messy (garbled) graphics. Once it is garbled, it is necessary to push the power button several seconds to force the computer to stop. Installing the package nvidia-current solved the problem: indeed the integrated graphic chipset is an NVIDIA GeForce 7025 (nForce 630a).
Note 1: sometimes I do not get the Grub menu at boot time, for some reason. However, after pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL, it appeared at each try I made.
Note 2: at some time, I tried to add the line “blacklist: nouveau” in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, before installing the nvidia driver. I don’t know if it is the reason, but after a reboot I obtained a busybox shell with the string “initramfs” at prompt; even with the failsafe version of Linux available in Grub where I should obtain the traditional “curses” failsafe menu containing several options. I read on internet that it may be due to a faulty RAM. But a test with memtest86 (available in GRUB menu) yielded a good condition for the RAM. I decided to reinstall Kubuntu 13.04 to solve the problem. I don’t know if it was necessary.
Note 3: the integrated card reader (connected to a USB extension port of the motherboard) does not work with a 8GB SD card. However, it is readily found with “lsusb -v” (and not “lspci”):
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 07b8:e004 AboCom Systems Inc Mass Storage Device
Couldn’t open device, some information will be missing
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 64
idVendor 0x07b8 AboCom Systems Inc
idProduct 0xe004 Mass Storage Device
bcdDevice 1.20
iManufacturer 1
iProduct 2
iSerial 3
bNumConfigurations 1
Configuration Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 2
wTotalLength 32
bNumInterfaces 1
bConfigurationValue 1
iConfiguration 4
bmAttributes 0x80
(Bus Powered)
MaxPower 500mA
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 0
bNumEndpoints 2
bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage
bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI
bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk-Only
iInterface 5
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x01 EP 1 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x82 EP 2 IN
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes
bInterval 0
Connecting the SD card does not result in any new log message with “dmesg”. The reason is that the card reader is not able to read high capacity SD cards:
see here.
