Another board that works reasonably well for Ubuntu Hardy is the Asus M3n78 Pro. This board costs quite a bit more money, but it is a full ATX sized motherboard instead of the Micro ATX boards I discussed in a couple of previous posts. Some of the more notable features of this board are the four Memory slots, 3 PCI Slots, 2 PCIe 1x slots, a 16x slot and an integrated Gigabit NIC. This would not be a bad board for a MythTV backend server that you wanted to stick a bunch of disks and recording devices in. In fact, this is the exact board that I rebuilt my home server onto. Everything worked out of the box with this board except for the video which required that I install a newer video driver. The server now runs headless anyway now though.

-Kirt

For the guys that have been building systems with the Asus M2N68-VM, you will notice that inventory has been drying up. Even newegg.com does not have them sale anymore. One possible replacement for a low end workstation is the Asus M2N68-AM SE2. It has a similar, but scaled back feature set. They drop HDMI connector, drop from two to one PCI slot, drop the gigabit nic to a 100 Mbit nic and also drop down to two SATA ports from four. The video is a similar 7000 series chip that is compatible out of the box and it does have the same Nvidia nForce 630 Southbridge that just works with Ubuntu Hardy, 8.04. This is the Linux version that we prefer to roll for our Spokane based customers that need computers that just work for their standard web applications and word processing chores. This is another one of those board where everything just works out of the box.

-Kirt

Here’s an interesting one we came across yesterday. When the client(s) printed to the HP 6110 it printed the page as a mirror image. The printer was attached to a XP Pro machine on the network. Yes, the mirror image check box was NOT checked in the properties. It took awhile on the first workstation to figure out but here’s what we did to solve the problem.

Delete the printer on the workstation the printer is attached to and search the registry for 6100. In our case there was two separate keys for the hp6110 we had to delete.  Make sure the key is specific to the HP printer. Now reboot the workstation. Once it has rebooted, you can then re-install the printer.

You are not done yet because that did not fix the issue on the network workstations. We had to repeat the same process on each network workstation. Delete the printer, scour the registry, reboot, and re-install. Why did it start doing that? We don’t know. Something corrupted the driver apparently. Why HP doesn’t remove the registry entries either is unfathomable. In our case we had to remove the entries to get the mirror image printing to stop. Deleting the printer and re-installing did not work for us.

Hope this helps you out.

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