VIA EN12000EG

Features

• Processor

1.2GHz Via C7 Fanless

• Chipset

VIA CN700 North Bridge - Unichrome Pro

VIA VT8237R Series South Bridge - VT1618 AC97 Audio

• OnBoard

1 x PCI slots

1 x DDR2 400/533 DIMM Socket (upto 1Gb)

2 x UDMA 133, 2 x S-ATA

• Ports

S-Video out, RCA out, 10/100/1000 lan, 4 x USB2, 3 x Audio, VGA, Mouse, Keyboard, Serial

Manufacturers Page: Via EN Series Mini-ITX Mainboards

Issues

This board is not able to support hdtv out - the maximum TV-Out resolution is 1024x1024 otherwise it makes a perfectly reasonable quiet, low power(12-14W) frontend and/or backend. This note captures a working configuration because it took me longer than I expected to get it running using a HVR900 USB tuner.

Configuration

• Check dmesg on boot - the default/fail-safe default settings leave the board at 400MHz. Use Load Optimised Defaults in the BIOS to get 1200MHz

• Working configuration:

MythTV 0.20.2 (SVN 14300)

Linux 2.6.22.6

I Needed binutils 2.18 to get round a 'File Truncated' / 'make: *** [bzImage] Error 2' when make install was trying to compress vmlinux.bin to make bzImage

Working .config file VIA_EN12000EG_linux_config

Xorg 7.3

This needs libdrm built and also needs libxcb to have relaxed locking - the libxcb sloppy_lock patch [1] does not work with my Qt 3.3.4 (The lock assertion fires - I just removed the assertions to get it to work.)

My xorg.conf for UK PAL VIA_EN12000EG_xorg.conf - generated new and supplemented by guidance in [2]

Unichrome SVN 396

Following the Unichrome wiki [3] - my X11 was in /usr/X11R6 so my prefix was /usr/X11R6

Marcus Rechberger's Em2880 drivers - for the HVR900 card (A1C0) following [4]

• This configuration runs at 75-78% idle watching S-Video out TV as a combined frontend/backend and 82-88% idle watching remote recordings. Enabling Bob*2 deinterlace takes 5-15% additional cpu.