Move over Fedora Core 5, here’s Ubuntu 6.10!
Wahoo! Ubuntu 6.10 installs on my Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, SATA Maxtor 320GB drive, and IDE CD-ROM drive! Now I have Ubuntu running on my system.
I have to give credit to Fedora Core 5 for allowing me to work with Linux when Ubuntu 6.06 couldn’t be installed on my system then.
Ubuntu 6.10 wasn’t that smooth because many attempts saw the Install program freezing at various points during the copying of the files. In the end, I booted the Ubuntu 6.10 with “all-generic-ide” option, and installation managed to complete. I think there was some problem with the data transfer between the IDE CD-ROM and the SATA hard drive. When I tried installing earlier with the IDE CD-ROM and an IDE hard drive, I didn’t encounter problems.
So why am I so excited even though there were some hiccups during installation? Well,
- it detected my 1280×1024 screen resolution correctly,
- my sound card worked immediately, with ALSA 1.11 too!
- usb devices are recognised without freezing the Gnome. FC5 has that problem.
- it boots up faster,
- its Synaptic Package Manager runs a lot faster than Yum.
So far, that’s what I observed. I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu 6.10 so far.
Thanks guys! Great job!
Amendments:
I neglected to mention that the setting of “On-board SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode” (in my motherboard’s BIOS) is “IDE”.
Update:
Lots of people still reading this article, so I would like to update that Ubuntu 7.04 is now available!
Juice Bar 
Hello there..
I found your site googling for an answer so i can install ubuntu with the GA-965P-DS3 and a Sata HD.
You seem the only one on earth that had success installing edgy with this motherboard.
I just tried the “all-generic-ide” option but still no cdrom found problems..
I have read that the current kernel will only see SATA channels 1,2,3 and 4… but not 5.. and that is where this motherboard is allocating the cdrom…
so would you please give me any clue?
I also tried playing in the bios with the SATA settings and no luck… flashed the mobo to the latest bios and still nothing..
How did you get it installed?????
Thanks a lot… good luck!
Hi Telovoy,
Did you modify your BIOS to use AHCI mode for your SATA/IDE drives? Other than the “all-generic-ide” pointer, that’s the only related point I can remember to the IDE CD-ROM scenario.
Oh, I remembered that I also set the CD-ROM drive to be the master drive on the IDE bus, otherwise it won’t be recognised by your BIOS. You have to set this by putting in the jumper connector for the pins on your CD-ROM drive. Please refer to your CD-ROM drive manual for this, cos it’s related to your hardware.
I hope you will get to install Ubuntu on your system soon. Good luck!
Thank you.. but is not working for me. I tried with 3 different cdrom drives, and different configurations (master, slave, etc) and there is no way that the mobo will put any of these below the 4th channel.
i get hda block errors messages.. one after another… forever..
would you check in your bios what channels are using each drive?
and what version are you using… mine is F9.. it is the latest bios from gigabyte
Thanks again.
Hi Telovoy,
My BIOS is F3. Yeah, kind of outdated, but it’s working for me.
My SATA harddisk (Master) is on channel 0, and the CD-ROM (Master) is on channel 4.
I have to mention that the “On-board SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode” is set to “IDE”. I’ll amend my blog. Sorry about that.
Hey Juice… if it would not be because i read this page, i would have give up trying to install ubuntu in this machine..
but after 3 days.. i finally managed to continue the installation…
so thanks to you… !! i wish you a happy thanksgiving and good luck.
PS: the solution was just let the stupid “bad block error on hda blah blah blah” loop in the screen like for half an hour untill it timed out and then the installation continued from there.
Do you incidentally have tried the front-audio functionality of the board? I cannot get that working here
however on windows it needs 30 megs of two different drivers to get any sound at all.
I have tried to get the front audio working, but failed. In the end, I gave it up. 🙂 All the effort wasn’t worth it when I could just plug my headphones in the rear.
I have this motherboard with bios F10, my DVD-ROM is SATA and so is the HD, a 250gb Seagate 7200.9 16mb.
The install appeared to go fine, however on first boot the splash screen disappeared and was replaced by a huge list of numbers, in sequence, with some values after them. Then at the very bottom (once the machine had unfrozen after a minute), there was a message stating “not going to try to fix this problem”…. what problem?
It then booted, albeit with no hardware detection. I have no network connection, the monitor resolution is stuck on 1024×768 @ 60hz when my TFT’s native res is 1280×1024. I cannot create a new interface nor can I update the installation.
Any pointers?
Hi Scott,
Your experience with bios F10 makes me wary of upgrading my bios. 🙂 Yeah, I’m still running on F3.
Your description sounds like an OS issue with the hardware. Memory problems? Some card or cable not connected properly? Any way for you to do a hardware diagnostics? You could also try Ubuntu’s support. I think they will be able to make sense of the string of numbers.