REDHAT LINUX 7.3 on nForce based systems - An installation guide.

Question

INSTALLING REDHAT LINUX 7.3 ON NFORCE BASED SYSTEMS.
A) Preface
I'm a Linux newbie, just sharing my experience with installing linux on nforce.
in my opinion Linux is a powerful but still a nascent operating system (in terms of user friendliness atleast!). many features are extremely 'release' and 'version' dependent.  this means that, what works in redhat might not work in mandrake or what works in redhat 7.3 might not work in redhat 7.1 or likewise...
the steps i'm listing below just reflects how i went about installing RH 7.3 on my machine (K7N420D). it MAY not work for other versions or releases.
B) BIOS SETTINGS
1. I recommend, PnP disabled, ACPI/APIC disabled.
for Mandrake 8.2 install on some machines (mine included), i suggest disabling audio and network in the bios till you get a stable level 3 (console without X windows) or level 5 install. for some reason, sometimes, on some boards,  Mandrake 8.2 hangs when probing audio and lan during boot.
C) PREPARING TO INSTALL
1. i suggest you get the three iso images from the internet and burn them into installation disks. though there are other ways of installing, this is the simplest way of doing it.
2. if you have windows installed already, make sure you have a windows boot floppy in case of boot problems, you can also make one for linux during installation.
3. using windows or fdisk strip off a sufficient chunk of hard disk space from an existing partition if you don't have a free partition. you need not create any partitions, just the non-allocated space would do. (as red hat can beautifully split this partition into /boot, / & swap partitions!)
4. i recommend using GRUB (GRand Unified Boot-loader) instead of LILO for boot management. if you prefer the same way, get good documentation/how-to for grub from the net. this will be handy if you mess up your boot partition and end up in a grub prompt during boot.
5. goto nvidia's drivers page and get appropriate drivers. i always recommend tar balls or src.rpm files instead of pre-compiled rpms. if you are using EXACT same version of the linux release as mentioned in the drivers page you can use rpms. If you wish to upgrade your kernel or use a different version of linux then make sure you have tar balls or source rpm files. make sure you also print the installation instructions from the same page.
6. the drivers you need are
a. NVIDIA_nforce-1.xxxx. - you need this one for audio & lan. (found in nforce link in drivers menu in nvidia site with an instruction manual)
b. NVIDIA_kernel-xxxx AND NVIDIA_GLX-xxxx- both these for Graphics in Xwindows. these two drivers should be exactly matched. i suggest you download all of them along with a files named NVchooser.sh found on the same page. NVchooser will tell you which pair to install for your linux kernel version and CPU.
D) LINUX INSTALLATION
1. boot from 1st installation disk that you made. go through the GUI installer and choose automatic partitioning, it will take you to the Disk Druid and you can select the partition in which you wanna install linux. if the partition you choose is unallocated, most of the times didk druid will make three patrtions on its own, one is /boot (boot partion), /swap (partition for swap, similar to ramdisk) and / (root partition). all the three mount-points may be allocated on the same partition too.
2. Choose GRUB (if you prefer) as boot loader and set Linux as primary boot OS and this page would've detected windows if you've already (it may appear as DOS). Choose "MBR" to install GrUB. If you get any warning ignore it. IMPORTANT: If you have NTFS partition for windows and you had windows as primary OS, there is a reported problem that says, in some versions of the linux installer, choosing MBR to install GRUB makes it hard to boot into windows. i haven't tried that option yet as i don't have a NTFS partition. If you have an NTFS partition, you may prefer to choose the other option to install GRUB or you may choose to install it later. in either case make sure you have a boot floppy to get you into linux or windows, whichever one you want.
3. choose automatic install if you don't want to control which packages you want to install. else choose expert installation and proceed with it.
4. when prompted to check the packages you want to install, choose "development tools" or something similar without fail. This is for installing a C compiler which is a must have for some driver installations. (this also installs perl and other dev tools, if you're an 'expert', there's an option in this page to custom select modules)
5. somewhere you'll be asked to provide a root password, in the same page there'll be a provision to add users other than root. create atleast one user other than root at this time.
4. somewhere you'll be shown a list of video adapters with NVIDIA Geforce 2 generic driver already highlighted. Below this screen you'll see a "Skip X install" or something similar. CHECK THIS TAB and this will NOT install the generic driver for your integrated GPU and also will not configure the GUI environment for Linux. This makes your video configuration a little easier.
5. now linux will install, get configured and will ask if you wanna create a boot floppy. make one just in case you
6. RH 7.3 will not recognize your APU and integrated LAN. you can install the drivers for this later.
7. After installation boot into Linux, if you just followed the steps above you'll nicely end up in level 3 console!
E) INSTALLING DRIVERS
1. Assuming you got all the drivers in CD/floppy, login as 'user', type command "su" (super user) supply root password, now you are logged in as root. read the installation manual for the NVIDIA drivers and install NVIDIA_nforce-1.xxxx drivers for audio/LAN. do these series of steps from the console prompt,
#vi /etc/modules.conf
press INSERT key, add the following lines,
alias eth0 mcpeth
alias sound-slot-1 i810_audio
alias usb-interface usb-ohci
press ESC, (Shift) colon, wq and Enter.
This will save the changes you made.
2. Now install the NVIDIA_kernel-xxxx AND NVIDIA_GLX-xxxx- drivers as per instructions. follow the steps below.
#XConfigurator
Choose settings that are relevant to the monitor you use and mode supported. Choose custom configuration wherever possible. If your monitor is not listed, choose 'custom' all the way through and provide hardware details such as horiz/vert freq range, video memory and clock settings (choose 'recommended').
DO NOT LET THE XCONFIGURATOR PROBE ANYTHING. sometimes this might cause a hang that is not necessary at all.
select all videomodes and color depths that you think your monitor will support and exit XConfigurator without any probing.
3.  Now at the prompt do the following,
#vi /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
Press INSERT and make following changes.
replace line
Driver "nv"  
with
Driver "nvidia"
In the Module section, make sure you have:
        Load   "glx"
Remove the following lines: (or put a hash before)
        Load  "dri"
        Load  "GLcore"
and the whole
Section "DRI" (last three lines usually, DRI may be in lower case usually)
Press Esc, (Shift) colon, wq, Enter to save and exit.
4. using vi make sure you have these lines in /etc/modules.conf file
alias char-major-195 NVdriver
5. edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local and insert
/sbin/modprobe nvaudio
/sbin/modprobe nvnet
save and exit. ( this is a crude way of loading modules but it works though!)
6. Type "reboot" at prompt and reboot your system.
7. get into bios and load original settings. (get back ACPI if you have windows, enable PnP OS etc)
8. During restart linux may get you into the kudzu installer to install network drivers/audio, ignore this.
9. login as "user" and type "startx" from console, your GUI should start smooth and you'll have video, sound, USB, LAN working (you need to fiddle a little bit more to get things work perfect) !
10. There is extensive documentation found in the internet on these topics, have fun exploring them.
F) TWEAKING YOUR HARD DRIVE
most of the modern hard drives support UDMA transfers and usually linux is pretty much conservative on this option. so you might want to force linux to use UDMA. the following discussion assumes that your hard drive is /dev/hda, change it to hdb, hdc etc as per your setup.
CAUTION: The 'hdparm' utility described here is a very powerful and dangerous if used improperly. USING hdparm IMPROPERLY MIGHT CORRUPT YOUR PARTITIONS AND RESULT IN SEVERE DATA LOSS. hdparm works with IDE drives. i'm not sure how it works on SCSI drives.
@ console,
1. type "man hdparm" and read through the hdparm manual atleast twice before you understand what it can do. THIS IS A MUST.
2. login as root or get into super user mode and try the following. all commands are shown after #
3. Benchmark the hard drive
# /sbin/hdparm -t -T /dev/hda
this should spit out the transfer rate both cached and sustained. note this value. if these values are close to what you expect out of your drive, you are OK. you may get out of further adventures! if the transfer rates are horrible like 3.5 Mbps etc (it was on my seagate ata IV drive!), then proceed with the tweaks. the golden rule is, after each tweak, run the benchmark and record your transfer rate. if there is no significant improvement, revert back to the default settings.
4. # /sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hda
note down MaxMultSect, MultSect, Modes supported : PIO/DMA, especially the mode with a 'star' in front of it. (prefered mode)
5. 32 bit I/O : to enable 32 bit I/O over the PCI bus
# /sbin/hdparm -c1 /dev/hda
this usually doubles your transfer rate if the drive supports. you may need to use -c3 for some chipsets.
6. Enable DMA and set DMA mode
if your drive supports DMA find out the prefered DMA mode using -i option.
# /sbin/hdparm -d1 -Xab /dev/hda, where
ab=64 + uDMA mode number (for eg. 66 for UDMA 2)
ab=32 + DMA mode number (for multi-word DMA mode)
you might need to prepare the chipset to enable DMA but on most of the modern hard dirves this works. refer to the "man hdparm" for details. beware, the options to 'prepare' the chipset for DMA should be used with EXTREME caution. if you do not know what you are doing, don't try it.
7. To set multiple sector mode I/O,
# /sbin/hdparm -m XX /dev/hda
where XX is the MaxMultSect value obtained using -i option. if the MaxSect is already set to this value, you need not tweak this.
after all these tweaks run the benchmark atleast three times consecutively and average the transfer rates. make sure you don't hear grinding noises in the hard drive. use these tweaks a couple of times manually and if verything appears to be working fine, add the necessary commands to the rc.local script to execute them automatically during  start up.
G) FINAL WORDS
I assumed that you're a total 'newbie' to linux when writing this so i followed a conservative approach. most of the things that i described can be done in many ways, it's up to you to explore them! as usual, there MIGHT be typos and other serious errors in this guide. also the driver files that i might have mentioned here are the ones that were available when i wrote this. so you might wanna try their latest equivalents. i'm open to all healthy criticism and suggestions. when i installed linux on my nforce board, i was badly looking for an article like this on the net. i missed one, if it exists at all. so am i writing this. i hope you'll get benefitted by this in some way.
-Venk@

Answer 1

Venkat,
Thanks for this really really amazingly accurate and exhaustive post that helped me A LOT to install linux on my machine!!! Otherwise, I think I would still be hanging with a mandrake 8.2 trying to load sound...
My system is now fully functional but, (yes, there is a little but) I was not able to make the LAN function properly. When booting, while linux tries to load the ethernet module, I get something like:
'mcpeth device does not seem to be present, delaying eth0 initialiation'. Then, I open an X session, I try to use the network configurator, the ethernet device is there but when trying to activate, it fails... I swear I enabled the LAN in my BIOS.
I also tried to replace 'alias eth0 mcpeth' with 'alias eth0 nvnet' in /etc/modules.conf after reading the installation notes of NVIDIA drivers. I get a slighty different result: my boot error is now 'failed to load module'.
It is a shame I have to boot back to Windows to use my DSL connection. I think i need some insights. It will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Chouch
>I'm a Linux newbie, just sharing my experience with
>installing linux on nforce.
Not bad for a Newbie...