On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 21:15 -0500, Tim Holloway wrote: > Well, I can do without the graphical stuff. Some of my machines are > sufficiently antiquated enough that I can't put enough memory in them to > run X at all. And I don't care, since these boxes are doing the pushing > and shoving, not the "pretty" stuff.
Now I am just talking simple frame buffer background images and such when the bootloader shows up. Its a very moot issue because the time frame is usually a few seconds at best. Unless you need to make changes. On most of my systems I set it to 0-3, depending on if I even want to see that stuff or not. > Turns out that the RealTek drivers have to be manually built from source > for each new kernel version. This is a real deal breaker for PXE. I've > got better things to do with my time, and I didn't buy this mobo simply > because it was the cheapest thing around. I would have paid extra for a > unit that ran, even degraded, using the stock kernel drivers. I have ran into issues several times with onboard nics, not just relating to PXE either. Even worse when they become problematic. I still kinda rather have them be an external card. In some of my machines I had to go around and replace them all just to make diskless booting less problematic. Even when drivers are in kernel or otherwise, they can still have issues in the net/pxe boot loader, like I ran into with tg3 and pxegrub. Syslinux/pxelinux has better support there, but possible has issues with other drivers. > I'm ready to go out and buy one of those Intel NICs with integral PXE > ROMS. And I'm definitely going to pay more attention to whose onboard > NIC my next purchase has in it. There are enough kinks in the network as > it is. You can never go wrong with Intel network cards and Linux. I have long lived by them, and most all my machines use them, short of a few. I love e100/e1000. Long before there was good bonding and such there was IANS, Intels Advanced Network Software or something, great stuff. The machines I replaced nics in mentioned above all got Intel nics. I even went so far as to flash the PXE ROM firmware in each nic to the latest. Though that wasn't entirely necessary. -- William L. Thomson Jr. Obsidian-Studios, Inc. http://www.obsidian-studios.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
