I put together an Athlon 64 X2 system together last week and was having a heckuva time getting OpenSuse (Suse 10) installed on it. Once I was finally able to get the installer going, I couldn't get the NIC to cooperate. After fighting with it for a while, I got it to start installing. Then I got stuck. Once the first phase of the installer was done (installing all the packages) and it rebooted, I got a kernel panic while loading modules. I tried booting from a knoppix CD to look at the logs, they were empty.
After going around in that circle for a good day, I decided to try something completely irrational. I downloaded a flash update for the bios. After going through a pile of floppy drives, trying to find one that actually worked, I was able to boot and flash the bios. What a difference 3 months makes. With the new bios image, the system booted fine and I was able to complete the installation.
I don't know who to be more annoyed with, the motherboard manufacturer for shipping out products that are so buggy they need their firmware updated every one to three months or the kernel developers who don't have drivers for the most popular Athlon 64 platform in the world hammered out yet. I suppose it better be the manufacturer. I certainly don't have the skillz to fix the kernel code.
At least it works now and I'm up and running. Next A64 box I build, first thing I'm doing is flashing the bios.
Oh, and by the way, it was an Asus A8N5X, for those who are curious.
OK, so I spoke too soon. This thing is still being a pain in the @$$ and I'm pretty sure it's because of the nv_sata driver. I can only get it to boot when I add "acpi=off apic=off ide=nodma irqpoll" to my kernel boot line. the problem there is that I already ahve all these options specified in the grub menu.lst file I was able to complete the installation, in spite of having to jump through hoops to get it. I'm now compiling a clean kernel. When that's done, I'm going to try and install nVidia's closed-source drivers and see if I have any better luck. Oh yeah, while I'm complaining: the forcedeth driver also sucks.
So it seems the problem with my kernel not liking my boot parameters was that I specified the vga mode too early on the line. Thanks to a tip by the_billness, I moved the vga= param from the beginning of the list to the end. I am now able to boot stably and consistently.
I also did download the nVidia drivers, but they were only for the audio and network components. After installing them, I still can't set the network link speed and duplex correctly using ethtool. So I have to leave it at autonegotiate, which is not optimal for our network here. So the bad news is the nVidia drivers also suck. The good news is they don't suck any worse than the open source drivers.
The next step is to get video working nicely. Right now, X wants to run using the vesa driver at 800x600. The newer version of sax2 with Suse 10 doesn't seem to allow me to specify the video card, only the monitor and resolution, and I haven't been able to successfully change the latter. I know that framebuffer is working because I have a high-res console. I just can't seem to get X to use it. This mobo uses PCI-express, which is what I think the current problem is. Maybe I just need to build the xorg.conf file by hand (yech). I'll be doing some more research today.
With my experiences so far, I'll be steering away from an nForce4 board on my next AMD64 box. The drivers just aren't there yet.
I was able to resolve the video problem, finally. It turns out that sax2 (which has been awesome in previous Suse releases, but pretty sucky with this release) had no idea how to deal with this video card (ATI X550). I dumped the xorg.conf file that it generated and used xorgconfig to build a new one by hand. Once I did that, I can now run X using the vesa driver at 1280x1024. I may try the ATI closed-source drivers (the xorg radeon driver doesn't like the card), but for the purposes of this box, the vesa drivers should be fine.
Again, I don't know who to blame here. Is it the PCI-e interface, the nForce4 chipset, the ATI X550 card, Xorg, or sax2? Or is it the combination of all of them? Who knows. The good news is that I finally seem to have a stable machine with a decent video resolution. I'm using the nVidia drivers for the NIC and sound card (for whatever that's worth as the NIC drivers still suck), and a custom kernel based on the Suse source for everything else. I don't like that it took me so long to get this far, but I'm glad that I finally got here.
I have a MSI K8N Neo4 nForce4 with Gentoo and have had Debian installed on it. Never had any problems with the chipset.
I think most of your problems are distro specfic. The nForce nic should work just fine on with the forcedeth driver, which is the 10/100 Nic section of the kernel. I have never had a problem with nv_sata either. PCI-e works great. NIC works great. Haven't test sound, b/c I have an Audigy 2 ZS, but would image it shouldn't be too hard to get going with the nforce drivers. Are you trying to get the fglrx driver going?
Dang Seth, I'm glad I didn't have issues that bad with my Athlon 64 system. I used the nForce 6100 939 series motherboard. Only issues I had with OpenSuSE 10 was the sound drivers which the Nvidia drivers fixed and the 3D acceleration for the onboard graphics. The version of the NVidia driver that SuSE provided with 10 didn't support my motherboard. Downloading the drivers from NVidia and compiling it myself fixed the issues.
I had tons of issues with a AMD64 bit system getting anything installed on. My solution: upgrade to a silver based thermal grease on the CPU. Now linux installs great-
I am not sure what you are getting at with that post, but AMD stock coolers and stock thermal pad work great.
I have an AMD Athlon64 Socket 939 3500+ Venice Core which idles at low 30s and hits about 40c at full load...and this is with stock cooling and stock speeds. Slapping some AS5 on it would probably bring it done a couple of more degrees!
The point is that it isn't always the system that's the cause of all troubles. I agree that stock coolers work well and are usually good. I had an unstable system for a long time, and tried everything to try and make it stable again. The network was flakey, sometimes it wouldn't boot, the graphics didn't work all the time, etc. etc. It wasn't stable until I switched thermal goops.
If all else fails, it might be worth looking for the solution where its not supposed to be.