Product

The ASUS P4R8L motherboard can be found in the ASUS Pundit-R (also known as the ASUS AB-P 2800 "Book Size Barebone System").

Drivers

Here, I'll just list the main components of the system, and the linux drivers used to drive them.

IDE

There’s a single PATA, and a single SATA connector. Devices connected to either are auto-detected by the kernel. The kit comes with data and power connectors for both kinds of devices.

Video

ATI Radeon 9100 IGP 128MB Shared (note, this is different to the “standard” Radeon 9100). Works fine with XFree86 ati driver, including 3D acceleration (in SuSE 9.2, the driver is called radeon). I didn't have time to try dual-monitors with the open-source driver. On the other hand, the video card doesn't work with the proprietary ATI drivers. Update: although I don't have the machine any more, Dirk Schmidtmeier reported that the latest fglrx-8.14.13-0.1.i586.rpm and km_fglrx-8.14.13-0.1.i586.rpm packages from SuSE 9.3 for the ATI proprietary drivers do work. Update: while testing with OpenSuSE 10.1, I found that the open-source radeon driver still works fine for DRI, using this /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration. The fglrx driver rev 8.29.6, on the other hand (although it works OK for 2D) no longer supports DRI. When trying to enable DRI, in /var/log/Xorg.0.log the fglrx driver gives the following messages, which according to this mean that DRI is no longer supported by the fglrx proprietary drivers for this graphics card:

(WW) fglrx(0): DRI is not supported on Radeon 9000/9100 IGP (RS300/RS350) hardware.
(==) fglrx(0): OpenGL ClientDriverName: "on_igp9x00_we_do_not_support_dri.so"

Ethernet

3Com 920 - auto-detected in Debian's Sarge Netinst (kernel 2.6.8.2), as well as by Fedora Core 3 installer.

TV-out

Haven't tested either the S-Video or the RGB TV-out ports.

DVI connector

Haven't tested the DVI monitor connector.

USB

USB 2, auto-detected, uses the standard "ohci_hcd" driver.

Firewire

Firewire is auto-detected, uses the standard "ehci_hcd" driver.

PCMCIA

PCMCIA is auto-detected, uses the yenta_socket cardbus driver, tested working with Adaptec APA-1460 SlimSCSI and APA-1480A SlimSCSI cards (for connecting to an HP ScanJet 4C). Under Debian, the module "sg" needs to be loaded for the "/dev/sg0" device corresponding to the scanner to be working. After loading the module, change the ownership of the "/dev/sg0" device so that you can access it. Adding the following line to "/etc/modules" will help the system automatically create the device when the APA-1480A SlimSCSI PCMCIA card is inserted:

sg

Audio

The audio controller is an ADI AD1888, 6 channel. The linux sound driver is auto-detected, and uses the snd_atiixp ALSA driver. May need some fiddling with module parameters to get sound to be clear, it's best to get alsaconf in Debian to do this for you.

Sensors

There are various thermal sensors on the motherboard and CPU fan, as well as system voltage sensors. These can be used with the "lm_sensors" package, using the "it87", "i2c_isa", and "i2c_sensor" modules. Under Debian, add the following lines to "/etc/modules" to load the required modules. Use either "gkrellm" or "torsmo" packages to get a running readout of all of the available sensors.

i2c_isa
it87

FLASH Memory Card Reader

Doesn't work yet, as far as I've been able to find out. Tested NOT working using 128MB SD flash memory card.

Specification

The ASUS Pundit-R makes for a very nice, small footprint desktop machine. It needs at least kernel-image-2.6.8.2 to take advantage of it.

Power Supply

200W power supply, switchable to 220V and 110V using voltage selector switch.

Physical Dimensions

91(w) x 357(d) x 275(h) mm

Drive Bays

• 1x5.25" External Bay
• 1x3.5" Internal Bay

Serial port

There's one serial port, a little awkwardly positioned, so needs a smallish connector to attach to it, as it is very close to the VGA connector. Tested using US Robotics 28800 modem, works fine.

Parallel port

Tested OK from Linux. The parallel port needed to be enabled in the BIOS first, though.

Model information

ASUS Pundit-R uses an ASUS P4R8L motherboard. (ASUS AB-P 2800 "Book Size Barebone System").

Installation

It's convenient to install either Debian Sarge Netinst, or Fedora Core 3 on this machine.
Novell/SuSE distros can also be installed if you replace the ASUS DVD-ROM with some other CD-ROM reader (see below for more details).

Distros Tested

Debian Sarge Netinst: successful.
Fedora Core 3: Successful.
SuSE SLES-9 SP1 and Novell Linux Desktop: Initially unsuccessful - kernel panic, logged bugzilla 66059 at http://bugzilla.novell.com Update: The problem turned out to be due to the ASUS DVD-ROM drive (an Hitachi GD-5000 8x/40x DVD-ROM). Replacing it with a Memorex DVD+-RW drive fixed the problem, which according to the bugzilla seemed to be due to the ASUS drive returning a block size which wasn't a multiple of the linux page size.

Current support

ATI Graphics Card: 3D acceleration is working with the "ati" open-source driver.

Own experience

Good value machine. There's just enough room to install a DVD writer, e.g. a Memorex DVD+/-RW True-8X drive will fit inside.
The PCI slots are not long enough to accomodate a full-length DVB card, nor are they actually wide enough to accomodate a standard card like the pcHDTV HD-3000 (described here), although with a little patience and persistence, a single HD-3000 card can be made to fit in the slot closest to the motherboard. During HDTV playback of 1080i streams with xine flag -V xv (mplayer option -vo xv), a pink bar appears, somewhat obscuring the right hand side of the video stream. Moving the window reveals the obscured video, but then the left hand side of the video is lost. There are two workarounds: either use xine option -V xshm (in mplayer, use -vo x11), or scale the stream using xine option -G 1280x720 (in mplayer, use the option -vf scale=1280,pp=lb). I can't really recommend this machine for use as a HDTV viewer, at least not when it's configured with a 2.26Ghz celeron: it's a little too slow. Of course, standard digital TV streams can be viewed just fine, even in full-screen mode, with no pink bar, and the CPU has no trouble rendering them. The 720p video streams also seem to playback quite fine, although they are not as common in my area as the 1080i streams.
I'm using:

• Intel Celeron D 315 (2.26GHz) 533MHz FSB, 256K L2 Cache as the microprocessor.
• 384MB Kingston DDR400 PC3200 CAS 2.5 as the memory.
• Western Digital Special Edition 80GB 7200RPM, Ulta ATA100, 8MB Cache, 8.9ms seek time as the hard drive.
• Memorex True 8x DVD+-RW drive as the optical drive.

The CPU runs between 45 and 50 celsius, according to the i2c sensors, and the machine is very quiet.

Other useful info

Front I/O

• 1 x PCMCIA
• 1 x 4-in-1 Card Reader (SM, MS, MMC, SD)
• 1 x Security Key
• 1 x S/PDIF-Out
• 2 x IEEE 1394 (6pin, 4pin)
• 2 x USB 2.0
• 1 x MIC-In
• 1 x Head Phone Socket

Rear I/O

• PS/2 KB/Mouse, MIC-In/Line-In/Line-Out
• 1 x S-Video
• 1 x TV-out
• 2 x USB 2.0
• 1 x RJ45(LAN)
• 1 x DVI-D
• 1 x VGA
• 1 x Parallel
• 1 x Serial 1 x VGA
• 1 x Parallel
• 1 x Serial

Power

• 200W, PFC

Motherboard

• ASUS P4R8L

CPU Support

• Intel Socket 478 Pentium 4 Northwood/Prescott, 3.2GHz+

Chipset

• ATI RS300 / IXP200

Front Side Bus (FSB)

• 800 / 533 / 400MHz

Memory (DIMM)

• 2 x DDR 400 / 333 / 266 upto 2GByte
• DIMM Sockets 2 up to 2GB

Graphics

• ATI Radeon 9100 integrated graphics w/ DVO support

Audio

• ADI AD1888 , 6 channel

Network (LAN)

• 10 / 100 Mbps Integrated (ATI IXP200 integrated MAC + RealTek 8201BL PHY)

Expansion Slot

• 2 PCI

Security

• HDD Security Key

Output of lspci -v

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5833 (rev 02)
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8107
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64
        Memory at f0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
        Memory at eff00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [a0] AGP version 3.0

0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5838 (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64
        Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=64
        I/O behind bridge: 0000d000-0000dfff
        Memory behind bridge: fd900000-fdcfffff
        Prefetchable memory behind bridge: cfe00000-efdfffff

0000:00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4347 (rev 01) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8108
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 177
        Memory at fe900000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]

0000:00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4348 (rev 01) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8108
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 177
        Memory at fea00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]

0000:00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4345 (rev 01) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8108
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 177
        Memory at feb00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2

0000:00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc ATI SMBus (rev 18)
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8108
        Flags: 66MHz, medium devsel
        I/O ports at 0a00 [size=16]
        Memory at 18000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]

0000:00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4349 (prog-if 8a [Master SecP PriP])
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8108
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 185
        I/O ports at <ignored>
        I/O ports at <ignored>
        I/O ports at <ignored>
        I/O ports at <ignored>
        I/O ports at ff00 [size=16]

0000:00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 434c
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8108
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0

0000:00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4342 (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode])
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64
        Bus: primary=00, secondary=02, subordinate=03, sec-latency=64
        I/O behind bridge: 00001000-0000efff
        Memory behind bridge: fdd00000-fe2fffff

0000:00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP150 AC'97 Audio Controller
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 810d
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, slow devsel, latency 64, IRQ 193
        Memory at fe800000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]

0000:01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5834 (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8107
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 185
        Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        I/O ports at d000 [size=256]
        Memory at fdc00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Expansion ROM at fdb00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [58] AGP version 3.0
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

0000:02:08.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3Com 3C920B-EMB-WNM Integrated Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 40)
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8108
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 201
        I/O ports at ec00 [size=128]
        Memory at fe200000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128]
        Expansion ROM at fe100000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2

0000:02:0a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
        Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 808a
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 201
        Memory at fdf00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
        I/O ports at e880 [size=128]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

0000:02:0c.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB710 Cardbus Controller (rev 02)
        Subsystem: ENE Technology Inc CB710 Cardbus Controller
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 185
        Memory at 18001000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Bus: primary=02, secondary=03, subordinate=06, sec-latency=176
        Memory window 0: 18400000-187ff000 (prefetchable)
        Memory window 1: 18800000-18bff000
        I/O window 0: 00004000-000040ff
        I/O window 1: 00004400-000044ff
        16-bit legacy interface ports at 0001

0000:02:0c.1 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc CB710 Memory Card Reader Controller
        Subsystem: ENE Technology Inc CB710 Memory Card Reader Controller
        Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 177
        I/O ports at e800 [size=128]
        Capabilities: [a0] Power Management version 2

Additional observations from another owner

• The CPU fan automatic control should be disabled if you use it in warm rooms, as it can get quite hot. Having the fan running all the time will make the unit a little bit noisy, but it's a small price to pay, however, for being able to use a Socket 478 hyperthreader (3E) in a case that satisfies carry-on luggage restrictions.

• The VGA-DVI-TVOUT can run two monitors at a time under WinXP + Catalyst with little drama.

• The VGA-DVI-TVOUT can run two monitors at a time under linux but requires some serious tinkering. The drivers for this feature are still kludgeware. Some of these problems arise from the manner in which the graphics chip was integrated into the motherboard.

• Getting the DVI to function using Xorg (Radeon or fglrx) or ATI's proprietary FGLRX drivers is a long meandering learning curve.

• The PCI riser support is a convenient place to strap on an additional ATA Hard disk if you use SATA for your primary needs.

• Mandriva LE2005 and SuSE 9.2 both work 'out of the box' to some degree, requiring a fair bit of work to recognize all the USB and other goodies. SuSE 9.3 Pro is unable to deal with the graphics, so plan on a <Ctrl><ALT><Fx> session to get a basic VESA single screen driver set up before touring any desktops under SuSE 9.3.

• Despite the graphics configuration problems, the unit is a real bargain these days. Finding a Micro-ATX motherboard with integrated DVI+VGA+TV is not an easy task.

>..X..<

• xorg.conf: /etc/X11/xorg.conf for OpenSuSE^? 10.1

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