If only. Those are pictures of it ignoring any sort of keyboard input.

Mine works fine running Ubuntu 8.04 except the nic. It's stayed on for hours doing USB CD to HDD copies as well as samba copies using a USB nic.

I picked one of these up last week, after fighting with it for some time, here is where I ended up:

- Ubuntu 8.10 and 8.04 will boot out of the box after installation, but networking requires the patched SiS190 driver. I just built a new kernel from 2.6.27 and patched the sis190.c in that kernel.

- The NIC driver sucks. I could not connect to a gig-e switch, but I could connect to a 10/100 switch just fine. I am now using a 10/100 bridged to the gig-e, but its probably solvable with ethtool and disabling auto-negotiation. To make matters worse, the driver does not handle full MTU (1500) frames properly. To make the card reliable (I transferred 800Gb of data after this), set the MTU to 1492 (in /etc/networking/interfaces, add a `mtu 1492` line in the interface config for eth0).

- The SATA controller sucks. The sata_sis driver can only see the two masters of each channel (right terms?). If you count down from the top in the drives bays, it will recognize 2 and 4 and not see 1 and 3. The '4' drive is the system drive. To fix this, the controller must be placed into AHCI mode. The only way I can see to do this is through a BIOS option, which may or may not exist because I don't have a VGA cable yet.

Going forward, what I could use help with:

If anyone has a VGA cable hooked up, could you scan the bios settings and see whether an AHCI option exists for the raid controller? If so, could you also document how the keypresses needed to set it from boot (blind). The chipset should support AHCI v1.0, but theres a chance the BIOS doesnt provide it as an option (under AHCI mode it has a different PCI ID).

I can confirm the AHCI option exists... I'll post pictures or instructions later if I can.

As promised:
Delete (to enter bios)
Down x3
Enter
Down x1
Enter
Down x8
Num_+ x3 (For 1st AHCI option)
(optional) Num_+ x2 (For 2nd AHCI option)
F10 (to exit bios & save settings)
Enter (to confirm)

Refer to JRock's Power Management Settings walkthrough for details and/or how to restore bios defaults.

Anyway I hope you find a way to get all 4 drives working... I'm concerned that you won't since the only AHCI options are both '2S' modes (S for slave, P for primary).

If you don't have any success with the AHCI modes try the "4P(IDE) + 4S(IDE)" mode (one Num_+ keypress from default setting).

Excellent, thank you! I will post back with results.

Short answer is it doesn't work, long answer:

The +/- had no effect, but Up/Down+Enter did, and that effect was not booting. I heard the drive spin up and start to boot for the 4P/4S IDE mode, but I need a VGA cable to actually debug what went wrong. Hopefully I will have one next week.

Odd... numpad +/- was definitely toggling the options for me. NumLock Issue?

Note that I wasn't entering the pictured submenu but rather manipulating it directly from the previous menu.

VGA helps.

That explains the disconnect -- it didnt seem to access save/enter/reboot after making those changes with +/-, my cable should arrive in the next day or two, so I can dig a bit deeper then. Thanks again!

Received my Video/PS2/Serial cable from Charles and got this working. The trick was instead of -/+, I needed PgUp/PgDown, regardless of capslock settings. In order to get all 4 drive bays working in Linux, do this:

1. DEL after fans spin up (tap it a bit and make sure you dont hear the drives start to whir), then give it a second.
2. Down x 3
3. Enter
4. Down x 1
5. Enter
6. Down x 8
7. Enter
8. PgDown (Once)
9. F10
10. Y
11. Enter
12. It should reboot.

This picks the second option from the list (4P/4S IDE), which works great with Ubuntu 8.10/8.04.

Still fighting with the NIC, so far it just refuses to talk on a gig-e port, even if the card is set to not auto-negotiate and hardcded to 100 full duplex.

s/capslock/numlock/. Looks like the SIS190 driver needs some serious work -- if you connect to a 100/full-duplex it works fine, otherwise the suck starts and requires a reboot to fix.

I've occasionally got it to work at 100MBps on my gigabit switch but as you said, it's quite finicky and I haven't found a foolproof procedure for getting it to autonegotiate correctly on a gigabit switch.

Have you ever gotten ndiswrapper to work with the SiS Windows drivers?

Have any of you made an image of your linux os thtt you care to share? I am contemplating purchasing one of these wonderful little gems but only if I can get it to run for months and months without any hickups. I currenty have an older Compaq ML350 dual processor and 6 scsi drives on a raid running CentOS 6.1 for my web and video streaming to my ps3. I want to upgrade to a sata box for web and streaming since storage is so chaep. Hell 1tb 7200 drives are $100 as oppsed to alomst $400 for a 300gb scsi.

Has CentOS been tried on a ex470?

_________________
EX485, 4gb ram
Intel® Pentium® Processor E5200 (2M Cache, 2.50 GHz, 800 MHz FSB)
4 1Tb drives
WHS 2011 64bit

I've been running Debian Lenny on it for the better part of a year. Except for the lack of Gigabit connectivity it works fine. It's well worth doing the 2GB mod and getting a VGA cable though. Oh, and don't touch the onboard flash

Oh really?! This sounds awesome. You wouldnt mind point me in some direction to a how-to or some kind of guide. Im not very good at this, the installation is no problem but the SiS190 / nic drive is my really concern.