The Joy of being on the bleeding edge

[plg6]

: Near the end of January my venerable HP Pavilion decided to go off to that great motherboard in the sky. Had a power outage, though the system was on a UPS, shut it down normally, all was good, I thought. Tried bringing it up later, nada, goose egg, big fat zero, you get the idea. The power supply would flash for a second and nothing. Checking the back revealed that even the LEDs for the network connection had gone dark, having transmitted and received their last packets. The good news was that the orderly shutdown should mean that the data on the hard disk was still okay (it is).

The problem I've got now is that after much perusing of systems, reading umpteen reviews, I finally opted for a custom built PC from a vendor in Missouri: nice job, great work. You can go down the whole list from case to CPU to motherboard, GPU card, memory, and so on and so on. Sweet.

I had them install Ubuntu 15.x on what I had thought would be a secondary hard drive so that they could test the machine with a running O/S. When I boot the latest version it sees the network fine. Boot Linux Lite and nothing. Contacted the vendor about it and was advised:

On the ethernet the only way we can get Ubuntu to work is if we install the latest version.  This board just came out in September so any OS made prior to that won’t have the drivers built in.

Gigabyte’s site is not showing any Linux drivers available.
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product...id=5490#dl 

As Pinky, of "Pinky and The Brain" cartoon fame would say, "Narf!"

Knowing that Linux Lite is built on the LTS releases, does it just make more sense for me at this point to switch to the latest Ubuntu (using xfce) after moving everything over from the Linux Lite disk, or does anybody have another idea?

Thanks in advance.

[nomko]

Well...the only thing i can think of here is that Linux Lite is built on top of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and that the copy of Ubuntu installed by that vendor is newer than Ubuntu 14.04 which also comes with a later kernel.

Knowing this you could try installing a newer kernel which might support your system better.

[Wirezfree]

Open up a terminal, and do a:

Code:

inxi -F

Then paste the results back here.
Let people see what you have for hardware.

[Scott(0)]

Hello Plg6

What version of LL did you try on the new system? LL 2.8 uses the highest kernel in the LL series - 3.19 kernel.

Scott

[plg6]

Thanks for the suggestions. Per request, the inxi output follows. Note I had to do this from the Ubuntu 15 side so as to be able to post the result. also inxi had to be downloaded. So I had thought to do it from both O/S's to compare what the ubuntu 15 sees vs what the Linux Lite sees, but if it's not in LL and has to be downloaded too - can't do that yet - small detail there.

So without further ado:

Code:

System:    Host: computer-To-be-filled-by-O-E-M Kernel: 4.2.0-27-generic x86_64 (64 bit)
           Desktop: Xfce 4.12.3 Distro: Ubuntu 15.10 wily
Machine:   System: Gigabyte product: N/A
           Mobo: Gigabyte model: H170M-D3H-CF v: x.x
           Bios: American Megatrends v: F4 date: 10/19/2015
CPU:       Quad core Intel Core i7-6700 (-HT-MCP-) cache: 8192 KB
           clock speeds: max: 4000 MHz 1: 3945 MHz 2: 3944 MHz 3: 3921 MHz
           4: 3914 MHz 5: 3899 MHz 6: 3897 MHz 7: 3915 MHz 8: 3938 MHz
Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GM204 [GeForce GTX 970]
           Display Server: X.org 1.17.2 drivers: (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) FAILED: nouveau
           tty size: 80x24 Advanced Data: N/A for root
Audio:     Card-1 NVIDIA GM204 High Definition Audio Controller
           driver: snd_hda_intel
           Card-2 Intel Sunrise Point-H HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.2.0-27-generic
Network:   Card: Intel Ethernet Connection (2) I219-V driver: e1000e
           IF: enp0s31f6 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full
           mac: 40:8d:5c:7c:5e:57
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 5033.2GB (0.7% used)
           ID-1: /dev/sda model: ST2000DX001 size: 2000.4GB
           ID-2: /dev/sdb model: TOSHIBA_DT01ACA3 size: 3000.6GB
           ID-3: USB /dev/sdc model: Silicon size: 32.2GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 2.7T used: 5.7G (1%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdb2
           ID-2: swap-1 size: 17.11GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sdb3
RAID:      No RAID devices: /proc/mdstat, md_mod kernel module present
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 29.8C mobo: 27.8C
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info:      Processes: 236 Uptime: 14 min Memory: 932.3/15984.3MB
           Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.2.16

[nomko]

Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GM204 [GeForce GTX 970]
          Display Server: X.org 1.17.2 drivers: (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) FAILED: nouveau
          tty size: 80x24 Advanced Data: N/A for root

I noticed this, you haven't installed a NVidia driver. I experienced with different distro's (based on Ubuntu) that installing the correct driver fixes a lot of system issues like system lagging, mouse response, etc.

When you install LL, also install a proprietary driver of Nvidia.

[Wirezfree]

Hi,

It looks like your Ubuntu install is using kernel 4.2.0
Linux Lite will be using 3.13

Take a look at this kernel thread...
Go to page 11 onwards, and and look at installing kernel 4.2.0, it also covers 4.3 & 4.4


Look for the kernel install posts like:

Code:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install linux-headers-linuxlite-4.2.0 linux-image-linuxlite-4.2.0 -y

[torreydale]

I concur with nomko and Wirezfree.  Your machine is a beast, by the way.  When you can get the video card driver and kernel issues settled, it should run very, very well on Linux Lite.

[plg6]

Again, thanks for the replies. By way of updates - this was a stock off-the-shelf Ubuntu install that the vendor did when they built the system. On the old system I had the Nvidia driver for a GT 640 card and that driver takes to the 970 just fine.

BTW for the heck of it I went and got the latest disk image of a current, non-Ubuntu based distro (heresy, I realize, but in the name of problem solving)!  ;D Booted it off the DVD and it sees the Ethernet fine.

I get the bit about upgrading the kernel. Wirezfree's command line apt-get makes perfect sense - if I could talk to the ethernet card to do it from within LL. A chicken-and-egg problem. I suppose if one could download all the requisite files to either a flash drive or DVD drive and use that as a source to upgrade the kernel with - that would bypass the need for the 'net. Is this do-able?

[Wirezfree]

I just installed LL on the latest Intel NUC i7 for a friend , that had a I218-V : e1000e network device that did not work.
I plugged in an old cheap WiFi dongle, and it worked well enough to get a connection to install kernel 4.2


Edit,
I just re-looked at your h/w.
I noticed the i7 at 1st glance, now I noticed it 6700(Skylake), if you have a wifi dongle it may still work.?