Shuttle SN25P - Experiences with WinXP x64-Edition and Gentoo 2005.0

I went out yesterday and picked up a couple of Shuttle SN25P barebones systems. The specs of both systems are as follows:

• Shuttle SN25P
• Athlon 64 3800+ (Retail Box)
• 1 GB DDR 400 RAM ( Cosair/OCZ )
• Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA HD
• ASUS EN6600/TD/256 GeForce 6600 256 MB DDR (PCI-Express)
• NEC ND-3520 16 DVD+/-RW 4X Dual Layer (Black)

They didn’t have two pairs of the Cosair memory I wanted so I got one box with an OCZ set. Otherwise they are identical. I still need to get a KVM switch and I’ll do that this week.

Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

I downloaded a copy of WinXP 64 (Final) from MSDN and I got it installed on the first system. After the initial login I realized I had a problem it didn’t see my network card or a lot of my other hardware.

I downloaded the drivers from nVidia and burned them to CD and tried to install them. No matter what set I downloaded they always were corrupt when I ran them. I tried the following versions of the Nforce drivers: 6.23, 6.25 and 6.39 beta.

So Windows is currently going nowhere until I can get some working drivers. Go figure.

Gentoo 2005.0

Gentoo was a lot simpler, I booted the other system with the 2005.0 AMD64 LiveCD and it detected pretty much all my hardware and I was ready to start the install. The longest part seemed to be building glibc as it builds for Linuxthreads and NPTL normally, however with AMD64 it compiles 32-bit/64-bit versions too. I thought it was never going to end at one point

The rest of the install was pretty straight forward. I had a couple of very minor issues installing software (some stuff I wanted to install didn’t have the ~amd64 keyword) but that was it. The only hardware I don’t have working right now is the soundcard, which according to the lspci is:

0000:05:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies
Inc. VT1720/24 [Envy24PT/HT] PCI Multi-Channel
Audio Controller (rev 01)

I tried the ICE/VT1724/1720 (Envy24HT/PT) ALSA driver in the 2.6 kernel but I just get the following error:

ice1724: No matching model found for ID 0x97123650
ice1724: Invalid EEPROM (size = 255)
ICE1724: probe of 0000:05:06.0 failed with error -5

I’m typing this on the system right now actually, I’ve got a full GNOME 2.10 desktop. Firefox works fine; Haven’t tried to get Flash working. Mono and the Gtk# libraries work fine. I’ve tested LAT and it works. Having some issues with the Clearlooks theme, so I’ve reverted to Bluecurve in the meantime.

I’m very pleased with this system! Hopefully I can get the WinXP 64 one going shortly so I can use both of them.