What can you do with A8M2N-LA / NodusM-GL8E?

Recently, I decided to turn my HP m7557c computer (motherboard: A8M2N-LA / NodusM-GL8E) to an Unix server. The nightmare began. After trying nearly 10 different operating systems and distributions, I found that only very few of them worked with A8M2N-LA / NodusM-GL8E. I think it is worth to share my experience with this beast – an experiment result that took more than 100 hours.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
-- Thomas A. Edison
The following operating system are listed in alphabetically:

Fedora 13
Status: No
Comment: Installation went well, but the system was very unstable due to kernel panic. This mother board may not compatible with the newer Linux kernel.

FreeBSD 7.3
Status: No
Comment: Does not support USB keyword, i.e., can’t start the installation.

FreeBSD 8.1
Status: Yes
Comment: Stable, however the harddrives are very unstable. Sometimes the system complains about the harddrive. See the full story here.

FreeBSD 8.2
Status: Yes
Comment: Very stable. No problem found so far.

OS X 10.4
Status: No
Comment: Installation failed.

OS X 10.5.8
Status: No
Comment: Installation completed, but very unstable. The system reboots itself.

OS X 10.6
Status: No
Comment: Installation failed

Ubuntu 9.10
Status: Yes, stable.

Ubuntu 10.04
Status: No
Comment: If install directly from the disk, the system will not boot. The only possible way is to upgrade from an earlier version. See Ubuntu 10.04 – Can’t boot / Can’t install for details.

Ubuntu 10.10
Status: No
Comment: Cannot even load the installation disk.

Hope my experience is helpful to you.

–Derrick

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A letter to Microsoft Internet Explorer Development Team

Dear Microsoft Internet Explorer Development Team,

Would you like to take the source of Firefox (or any browser besides Internet Explorer) and call it Internet Explorer 11?

Thanks.

–Derrick

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Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the $PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

This post is about FreeBSD, however the idea is about the same for other Unix systems.

While I tried to install memcached, the system complained with this message:

Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the
$PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

This problem is caused by missing couple variables at the shell level: PHP_AUTOCONF, PHP_AUTOHEADER. It is very easy to solve this problem:

1. First, make sure that Autoconf is installed in your system:

#pkg_info | grep autoconf
autoconf-2.68       Automatically configure source code on many Un*x platforms
autoconf-wrapper-20071109 Wrapper script for GNU autoconf

If autoconf is not available, install it from here:

cd /usr/ports/devel/autoconf268
make install clean

2. Now, we need to set couple variables. This step is very important because you can’t set the variable using sudo export x=y. First, switch to root

sudo su

3. Find out where is autoconf (The location in FreeBSD and Linux are different)

which autoconf

4. Set the autoconf, in my case, it is /usr/local/bin/autoconf

export PHP_AUTOCONF=/usr/local/bin/autoconf

5. Do the same thing for autoheader:

which autoheader
export PHP_AUTOHEADER=/usr/local/bin/autoheader

That’s it. Now try to install your software again and the error message should be gone.

–Derrick

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Finally, Ubuntu uses a more updated Linux kernel than Fedora

Historically, Ubuntu focuses on the user experience such as beautiful graphical user interface, while Fedora focuses on performance. In the other words, the kernel in Fedora distribution is more up-to-dated.

I just upgraded by Ubuntu 10.04 to 10.10 (released on October 10, 2010), I found that the Linux Kernel in Ubuntu is more advanced than Fedora. I am surprised!

#cat /etc/lsb-release && uname -a

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=maverick
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.10"
Linux 2.6.35-22-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Sun Sep 19 20:34:50 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

and for Fedora 13:

#cat /etc/redhat-release && uname -a
Fedora release 13 (Goddard)
Fedora release 13 (Goddard)
Linux 2.6.34.7-56.fc13.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Sep 15 03:36:55 UTC 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

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