Installation
When He's Underwater, Does He Get Wet?
Now, a few notes on testing criteria. The board was fitted with a single 1 GiB stick of PC2-5300 RAM, and due to my lack of small-form-factor kit, a full-size Seagate SATA disk (with a USB-attached DVD drive during some tests). And a full-blown ATX power supply. It all looked a little comedic really, given the size of the board compared to its supporting equipment.
I installed Xubuntu 7.10 for 32-bit x86 processors, and updated the supplied open-source VIA OpenChrome graphics driver to the very latest release: 0.2.901. Installing the OS went perfectly smoothly, albeit pretty slowly. The following details were picked up by the OS, post-install:
$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge (rev 03)
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700M2 IDE
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1
Controller (rev 90)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1
Controller (rev 90)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1
Controller (rev 90)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 90)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 PCI to ISA Bridge
00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Internal Module Bus
00:13.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:13.1 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 PCI to PCI Bridge
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700M2
UniChrome PRO II Graphics (rev 03)
02:06.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6105 [Rhine-III]
(rev 8b)
80:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA High Definition Audio
Controller (rev 10)
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : CentaurHauls
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : VIA C7 Processor 1000MHz
stepping : 0
cpu MHz : 1000.000
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce apic sep mtrr pge cmov pat
clflush acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 up pni est xtpr rng rng_en ace ace_en
ace2 ace2_en phe phe_en pmm pmm_en
bogomips : 2001.34
clflush size : 64
Sound was auto-detected fine (although muted by default), and once the latest OpenChrome driver was installed, there were no issues on that front. However, one irritation was the DVI support - despite having DVI support, it seems the board will only use it inside X.Org - no BIOS screens, no bootup screens, and even switching from X to a text terminal caused the screen to go dead (which is somewhat worrysome should troubleshooting ever be required). There were no issues with VGA, so make what you will of it.
