Runing Debian 3.0 on the MSI KT3 Ultra 2

Debian GNU/Linux on the Microstar KT3 Ultra 2 motherboard

A brief runthrough of the steps that I went through to get Debian running smoothly on a Microstar KT3 Ultra 2 motherboard. When I obtained this board (late 2002) the Debian stable distribution (then release 3.0) did not support it out of the box.

Important Note

Do not use these instructions for any other release of Debian than 3.0. In later releases it should not be necessary to follow these steps.

Components lacking support

The components which do not work entirely smoothly with Debian 3.0 are on the VIA VT8235 southbridge chipset:

IDE controller (not recognised by Linux kernel < 2.4.20)
Onboard AC97 sound (not supported until ALSA 0.9.0rc6)

Outline of steps to follow

Install Linux kernel > 2.4.20

From kernel version 2.4.20, the IDE controller on the VIA VT8235 is recognised correctly. In previous versions, you will see messages like this at boot time, or in your syslog:

   VP_IDE: Unknown VIA SouthBridge, contact Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>

As of 2.4.20 the IDE controller is recognised correctly. However, kernel 2.4.20 was not in the Debian archives when I wanted to install it, so it was necessary to download, compile and install the latest stable kernel. I recommend that before you choose to compile your own kernel, you check to see if the 2.4.20 kernel, or a more recent one, is available in the Debian archives, as a kernel-image package.

If you can't get a new enough kernel from the Debian archives:

install the necessary tools:

    # apt-get update
    # apt-get install debhelper modutils kernel-package libncurses5-dev fakeroot

obtain the latest stable kernel from one of the Kernel Archive Mirrors
and then follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/kernel-package/README.gz
```
    $ zcat /usr/share/doc/kernel-package/README.gz | less
```

Install ALSA

You need to install ALSA from the testing distribution, as the version in Debian 3.0 does not support the VIA VT8235 chipset's onboard sound. These steps show you how you can install only the ALSA packages from testing and keep the rest of your system running stable.

Put the following line on /etc/apt/apt.conf:
```
     APT::Default-Release "stable";
```
Edit your sources.list to include archives for the testing distribution.

Install the base ALSA packages you need:

   # apt-get -t testing install alsa-base alsa-utils

If you installed a kernel-image package obtained from the Debian archives, you should obtain the alsa-modules package compiled for the same kernel version:
```
   # apt-get -t testing install alsa-modules-xxxxx
```
However, if you compiled you own kernel, you should compile the ALSA modules yourself:
```
   # apt-get -t testing install alsa-source
```
If I recall correctly, you are prompted to select the card that you wish to compile drivers for at install time. Then follow the instructions in the README:
```
   $ zcat /usr/share/doc/alsa-source/README.Debian.gz | less
```
My memory of what I did next is unreliable, but I recall that for some reason the via82xx driver did not get compiled. I may have changed the last few lines of /etc/alsa/alsa-source.conf to look like this:
```
# Define cards to be built, separated by commas. For example, if you want to
# build Sound Blaster 16 and Yamaha YMF series drivers, then the setting
# would be:
#
#  ALSA_CARDS="sb16, ymfpci"
#
ifndef ALSA_CARDS
ALSA_CARDS="via82xx"
endif
```
but then again, my memory is hazy on this subject!

Hopefully you will now have working sound!

Tidying up

I noticed that lspci still reported unknown devices on the PCI bus. So I replaced the file /usr/share/misc/pci.ids with the newer list of PCI ids from the kernel source.

   # mv /usr/share/misc/pci.ids /usr/share/misc/pci.ids.old
   # cp $kernel_source/drivers/pci/pci.ids /usr/share/misc/pci.ids

Following this update lspci reports the devices correctly.