I have seen question of how to make VIA VT6421 PCI SATA card work under Ubuntu on number of forum posts and only solutions I have seen on Ubuntu forum was: “Solved:: Installed Windows. Got data no problems.” :(
 
This obviously is not the solution. I found a solution that works on Ubuntu 8.10 but probably will work on any other Ubuntu version.
 
So in order to make this device work you need to see what module it uses:
 
lspci -k|grep -i VT6421 -A 2
 
01:07.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE RAID Controller (rev 50)
Kernel driver in use: sata_via
Kernel modules: sata_via
 
So we can see that the module this card uses is called “sata_via”, now just load the module for this VIA card and of you go:
 
sudo modprobe sata_via
 

 
I really like Open Source software and would like have completely Open Source desktop at work, as I have at home. Our company uses Exchange mail server and since our admins switched to newer Exchange mail server 2007 there wasn’t an option to use anything but Microsoft Outlook for reading email on Linux desktop:(
 
Since evolution-mapi project got started I got really happy because it promised full Exchange 2007 compatibility, so that I could again use 100% Open Source desktop.
 
I tried it causally when Fedora 10 and 11 launched but knowing that the project was still fresh I didn’t expect much. Now that Fedora 12 with Gnome 2.28 launched I really hoped that evolution-mapi got stable enough for real use. Unfortunately there are some bugs that prevent international users from using Evolution. It is so close to being a perfect solution for lots of us who have to use Exchange, and that “almost there” feeling makes it even more frustrating :)
 
I know that lots of great hackers are working on fixing this solution, and we all are thankful for their contribution. I’m asking myself can we, regular users, donate and make some online actions so that we also get companies donate? Hopefully that would help the project in getting these issues fixed faster.
 
Do you have other/better suggestion how to help developers?
 
These are the mentioned bugs :
Mail is in the wrong encoding
unable to send mails containing UTF8 strings